The Looming Myth of Joseph Campbell
Take any writing class or browse the internet to learn how to produce a novel or a screenplay, and you’re bound to encounter advice on outlines. Consider this another entry, and treat it with as much skepticism as the rest. There are a thousand ways to outline your long-form work. And by that, I mean there are a thousand variations that differ in small but important ways, yet take more or less the same tack.
Most of them follow the Hero’s Journey. If you haven’t heard of it, you know it as well as I do. It’s possible that someone has never heard of air, but chances are, they breathe it every day. In brief, Joseph Campbell theorized that popular stories affect us so deeply when and because they follow a mythic archetype called the Hero’s Journey. There’s a call to action and an initial refusal, a point where the hero is yanked from the ordinary world, the beginning of a quest, a return with some treasure (literal or abstract), and other elements that occur in a certain order. Every story since the beginning of time fits this model, with only the details changing. Just about every movie you’ve seen in your life was written by someone who intentionally plotted it to fit the Hero’s Journey, because if they didn’t, it likely wouldn’t have been produced.
The same is true of popular fiction. According to Campbell, this is the monomyth, and anything that hopes to become or remain popular must satisfy it. If the writer wrote before Campbell’s work, they stumbled onto it by imitating popular stories they enjoyed throughout their lives, which happened to be the ones that fit the model and rose to the top.
It might be obvious that I don’t fully agree with Joseph Campbell. I think he did pick out a very popular form that can be found in old myths, and which captivates modern audiences. Anyone who’s read much mythology can see that there are plenty of other examples of enduring stories that fail to fit that model. Defenders of the monomyth unconsciously invoke the myth of Procrustes, the innkeeper who had a bed of a certain size. If a traveler arrived who was too tall, he would lop off a few parts to make them fit. If too short, stretch them into shape. He tolerated no variance from his exacting dimensions until Theseus took offense and fitted him to his own bed.
Are there other enduring forms that have power over us—other powers? Maybe. I suspect the singular dominance of the Hero’s Journey has as much to do with the fact that we grew up with nothing else in its ubiquity. It even bleeds into my own writing out of habit when I make no attempt to satisfy it.
Out of the Ordinary World
But that’s not what I came to fuss over. I want to examine the process of outlining a long-form story and writing to that outline, come hell or high water. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a writing teacher who suggests otherwise, and that’s because an outline can be quite useful. The extreme alternative would be some free-form, stream-of-consciousness scribbling that would be hard to rein in and finish for the writer, and harder to connect with for the reader, without some very formal revisions.
You could argue that everything has a structure. Most of what we see as structure, though, is overlaid after-the-fact. Where, for example, is the exact threshold for saying that a story includes a “refusal of the call”? Some examples are obvious. Others require lopping and stretching. But the ultimate decision is projected outward from the observer, not inherent in the work. That Campbell sees 17 phases to the journey says more about how he parses experience than of experience itself. His broader criteria, a three-stage separation-initiation-return cycle, is in fact so vague that it could be applied to nearly any story, making it almost meaningless. There are still myths without one of these, but it essentially says that in the story, “something changes.” The alternative is that we see a man sitting at his morning breakfast staring at the wall while he chews his usual bacon and eggs. Riveting!
So where do we get the idea of building something from a structure?
You’ve gone by a construction site and seen the wood frame of a house, the steel girders of a skyscraper, rising each day then filling out, getting its skin, and finally gleaming with purpose. A machine, too, often starts with a skeleton. Parts are connected, tuned up, made to coordinate. It receives a protective coat, and then whirs to life. Inorganic human creations often spawn from a blueprint and follow the process of filling-in until they come to life.
Nature doesn’t work that way. We don’t start as a skeleton, receive a few vital organs, then a network of blood vessels, and a sheet of skin before we’re touched off to life. A human or a tree is whole and alive at every stage of the process. To the whole, there is no structure unless we graft it on. It goes through changes, and we can freeze-frame a few and call those structural points, but that’s an arbitrary decision up for debate.
When we take up a structure as a starting point, we set out to build something artificial. It may function exceptionally well, but is there life to it? Though we tinker with genetics, we can’t engineer life. At best, it’s a deliberate sort of interference with a process that runs almost entirely without us.
Computational Irreducibility
I became acquainted with the concept of computational irreducibility through the book A New Kind of Science by physicist Stephen Wolfram. Briefly: a system that is computationally irreducible cannot be modeled. There is no way, given any amount of data about it’s past or present, to figure out in advance what it will look like at a given future state. No simulation will be correct. To understand where it’s going, you would need a model that is just as complex as the system itself, which is to say, you just have to watch and see. Many things in the universe enjoy this trait. Sometimes even very simple things that we would expect could be modeled easily.
When I was taught to outline, some teachers suggested going as far as to have a beat sheet that detailed in a single phrase what happened at each minute or page of the story, before sitting down to write. I will grant that many great novels and movies have been created with a similar process. I also wonder whether Homer or any of the others Campbell studied had a notion of where they were going when they began.
Imagine you had to outline your life. Write a sentence describing what happens in each year until you die. Now go live that outline. I think most people would find this difficult, even if they wanted it to happen. Calamity intervenes. Life takes unexpected turns. You might get some of it right, but you’ll probably end up somewhere unexpected as often as not. Then how do you get back on track? Do you force yourself there through the inertia of existence (a parallel to the sin referred to as “writer’s objective”)? Do you call the past a wash and make a new outline for the remaining years?
The cellular automata that Wolfram studies are remarkably simple. They start with a grid of cells, some black and some white (at times, also gray). There may be just six simple rules for how these colors transform into the others based on what color their neighbors are. But when you run these processes, the results are surprising. Some become a solid black surface, or an orderly line of black and white. Some repeat a simple pattern, occasionally a nested series of triangles, for example. Some go into random static like an old TV screen that lost the signal. The most interesting evolve as orderly patterns against a random background, never repeating over even a million iterations.
Regardless, it is impossible, knowing the simple starting condition and rules, to predict what type of result you’ll get, much less to model what the image of cells will look like at even 30 iterations.
What Breathes?
When we outline a long piece of writing in great detail, we create a mechanical structure and fill in the gaps. This can be as beautiful as any work of architecture, but it cannot have life. Life is a whole, and the whole evolves in a way that we can’t fathom in advance. This is true of the dullest of lives, or the shape of a patch of lichens on a rock.
Maybe there’s something else about our great myths, our stories that endure for millennia. How can we be sure that our classic movies, for example—cherished for 50 years or more—will hold up for another 50? Could it be something more powerful than a Rorschach structure that allowed them to survive? What stories do we miss out on by satisfying a culturally-fashionable outline instead of writing like the greats did, which was almost certainly without one?
That means that most things will fail to hit the mark, of course. And it doesn’t mean rambling on thoughtlessly. I’m sure those tales went through many versions, evolving like a landscape through seral stages to a mature form. But I suspect each may have been a whole onto itself, that grew from that whole into a slightly different one, and a different one.
Outlining the Future of Outlines
I don’t suggest this to say that people who use outlines are wrong. I don’t know that. Besides, I use them, too. While I do wonder what would be possible if stories were allowed to grow up organically again, I think there are lessons here that allow for a middle ground.
We don’t make a beat sheet for our lives, complete with key twists at ages 17, 30, 45, 59, and 72. But we do make plans, and to some extent, follow them. Our life plans are vague. We have some notion of being a cowboy, or a lawyer, and that notion changes over the course of our meanderings as old possibilities fall away and new ones appear. This is a fine model for how to outline a novel. We know a few things about who starts out and where, but the rest unfolds in a complexity that is best left to run on its own.
In a given year, we have much more specific intentions, and a greater probability of achieving them. Still, that old gal Calamity has her say. Let these be the chapters. Many things will go as expected. Some will surprise us. Maybe one or two of those surprises will cause a major change of direction, or maybe not.
Our days are full of plans, and easy to execute on the whole. We often know exactly how it will proceed—minus the dialogue and blow-by-blow—when we awake in the morning. The days are our scenes. They often follow directions immaculately. But sometimes, the unexpected arrives to change the course of that day, if not many more. Even in our tightly outlined scenes, there must remain room for the story to raise its hand and suggest an alternate route.
Outlines are most useful at the smallest scale. When they’re applied too tightly and too broadly, we get a story that follows the dreaded “writer’s objective,” the lopping and stretching of Procrustes to fit the bed he’s made in advance.*
*I often use a rough outline for these blog essays, but it felt only fair to write this one with no plan.
To Be Continued…
In a few weeks, I’ll share a method of outlining, if you can call it that, which works for me. I don’t claim it’s the only way, or even a good one. But don’t let my writing condemn it any more than a single bad Hero’s Journey story would ruin that fine form. At the very least, it satisfies the criteria for an organic story discussed in this essay. I call it the Wolfram Method.