The Writers Journey

5. Watch a scary movie and observe how the filmmaker manipulates
your breathing with editing, suspense, musical rhythms, color, etc.

6.  What kind of scene stirs up the most emotion or the strongest
physical reaction for you? Write a series of scenes aiming to evoke
specific emotional or physical reactions — to bring a shiver down the
back, to raise goose-bumps on the arms, to trigger tears or laughter.



So said Dante at the beginning of the Inferno and so I found myself at
a certain passage in the journey of my life, hiking alone in the forest near
Big Sur, California. I was in a dark wood, all right, and lost. I was cold,
hungry, shivering, exhausted, and panicked by the thought of night
closing in.

It had been a rainy winter, with storm after storm saturating the
hillsides after years of drought. I felt pounded by heavy weather in my
own life, and had come north to the sacred country of Big Sur to find

some things I had lost: solitude, peace of mind, clarity. I felt I had failed
in important areas of jobs and relationships and was confused about
which way to move next. I had some decisions to make about my
direction and knew instinctively that a plunge into the wilderness could
give me a vision of the future to lead me out of my present confusion.

As I set out on the well-marked Forest Service trail that winds into
the wild canyons of Big Sur, I noted a little sign that warned the trail was
rough in spots. I expected the path to be wet and muddy in places because
of the recent rains, but quickly found out I had underestimated the
ferocious impact of the winter storms on the fragile hillsides. The whole
mountain range was a vast sponge that was now draining slowly into the
canyons, unimaginable amounts of water carving new canyons and
streams. Time and again I rounded a corner to find that the trail ahead
simply vanished for fifty yards because a whole hillside had washed
away, trail and all, leaving a damp scar of crumbling shale and a waterfall
cascading down the raw rock. The freshly exposed rock is easily broken
into shards called scree that flow downhill almost as easily as water, and
can be as treacherous as quicksand. I could see the trail continuing again
beyond the stretch where the hillside had collapsed, and had no choice but
to scramble like a crab across the shifting, slippery rock face, clinging by
fingertips and toes, digging into the tumbling scree until I was back on the
level surface of the broken path. It continued for a few hundred feet
around a shoulder of the mountain, only to disappear again in another
mudslide that had to be crossed by the finger-and-toe method.

At first this seemed exhilarating, just the kind of minor wilderness
challenge that I was after. But after the third or fourth time of edging out
across a sheer, unstable cliff face with muddy water streaming over me,
the process began to take its toll. My arms and legs began to tremble from
the unaccustomed exertion, my fingers and toes grew cramped. My core
temperature dropped from repeated soakings as the cool air chilled my
clothes and skin by evaporation. At times the whole hillside of yellow
mud and shale seemed to be shuddering and slipping under me, flowing
in a slow-motion mudslide. By the tenth crossing I was starting to get
worried. The hike that was supposed to take an hour had taken three hours
and there was no end in sight. I lost my footing a couple of times in the
muck and barely caught myself, clinging to the crumbling rock with
fingers cramped and arms shaking, knowing I would fall for hundreds of
feet before I hit something solid and level.

And then, as my adventure led me around the cooler, shadow side of
the mountain, I reached a vast, wet scar where a whole slab of the

mountain had fallen away into a deep canyon, leaving a slanted field of
jagged boulders the size of houses that would be challenging to cross. I
didn't know whether to turn back or keep going. I began to measure my
strength very precisely, recognizing a primal, instinctive hyper-awareness
that comes when one is at the edge of death. For as I watched the sun sink
into the tree-line, I felt my life energy draining, and realized I was in one
of those classic California wilderness tragedy situations that you read
about in the newspapers. Some fool gets himself stuck in the woods at
night and falls into a canyon and breaks his neck or wanders lost for days
until he starves to death. It happens all the time. Was this my turn?

With my heightened awareness I knew almost to the calorie how
much energy was left in my body. I had brought little food with me, just a
handful of trail mix, and had consumed that long ago, observing how the
nuts and raisins instantly charged me with energy, only to send me
crashing a few minutes later when I had burned them off in scrambling
across the treacherous shale. How thin is the margin that preserves life. I
knew that every step from now on was drawing on core reserves. I could
almost see the sands in the hourglass of my life rushing inevitably down
to nothing.

The question was whether to turn back or go ahead. The way ahead
was uncertain. I couldn't see the trail picking up on the other side of the
landslip and I knew it would be a difficult task to cross the rugged face of
the scar, which was the only way to continue. It would take as much
energy as I had already expended, maybe more, and there was no
assurance that I would be able to find the trail again in the trees on the
other side. I might just be plunging deeper into the wilderness with night
coming on.

I thought about turning back and re-tracing the broken trail I had just
traversed with such difficulty, but I knew with a terrible certainty that if I
tried that, I would die. My hands were cramping up like claws and would
be almost useless. My arms and legs were shaking and I was absolutely
sure that I would fall if I tried to go back across three or four more of
those muddy vertical rock faces, especially in the dark.

So I gathered my strength and continued on across the field of
boulders, crawling like an ant, an insignificant dot on the flank of a
mountain. I was impressed by the immense forces that had raised these
rocks thousands of feet into the sky in the first place and now had torn
down the mountainside. I finally made it across into the trees, winded,
cold, and feeling at the end of my strength, but now there was a different
problem. Where was the trail? There was no sign of it. Vague paths

seemed to lead me deeper into darkness, into brambles, into impenetrable
cool thickets like those surrounding cursed castles in fairy tales. I
stumbled up and down the mountainside, my face and hands scratched by
branches, hoping to intersect with the true path, but getting more and
more hopelessly lost and frantic as night crept near. I had to get out of
there. I knew it was a very bad idea to attempt to spend the night in the
forest, unprepared. People die of exposure out here all the time. I noticed
for the first time that air on a mountain flows at different times of day like
a mass of water. Cold air seemed to be rushing downhill all around me,
flooding the bottomless canyon and chilling my blood, dragging my
spirits further down.

I dread that word "lost" and tried to deny it to myself, but I had to
admit it. A whole host of unfamiliar sensations and thoughts came over
me as I watched the shadows of the black trees march down the canyons.
My heart pounded, my hands shook. The forest seemed to be speaking to
me, pleading with me, calling to me. "Come," it said in a witch's voice of
a million leaves rasping together. "Here is an easy end to your pain. Join
us! Jump! Take a run and launch yourself off this cliff into this canyon. It
will all be over in an instant. We'll take care of everything." And oddly
enough, that plea sounded appealing and reasonable to some part of me,
the part that was terrified, the part that just wanted this awful moment to
be over.

But another sliver of my brain stepped back, and recognized that I
was experiencing the common human psychological state known as
panic. The Greeks, with their talent for naming things, called it panic
because they believed it was a visit from the nature god Pan, goat-footed,
flute-playing Pan, who can inspire mortals but also has the power to
terrify them, overwhelming their senses with the awesome forces at his
command, causing them to do foolish things and die.

I felt the presence too of the witches from the old European and
Russian folk tales, fearsome figures who represent the dual nature of the
primeval forest. The heroes of those tales learn that the witches, like the
forest, can quickly break, destroy, and consume you, but, if you learn how
to appease and honor them, they can also support and protect you like a
kindly grandmother, hiding you from enemies and providing you food
and shelter. At the moment, the forest was turning its nastiest and most
seductive witchy face to me. There was something alive and evil and
hungry out there, like the witch in "Hansel and Gretel" but stretched out
over the whole forest. I was in big trouble.

I stopped and took a breath. That simple act brought a sudden surge
of clarity and common sense to my panicked brain that was causing me to
rush about like a terrified animal. I realized I had not been breathing
properly, that my gasping and panting had deprived my brain of oxygen.
Together with my exhaustion and the sudden chill, I was in a mild state of
shock, blood rushing away from the head and extremities to preserve a
core of life force and heat. I took a few deep breaths and could feel blood
returning to my skull.

Instead of thrashing around pointlessly, I took in my surroundings and
got in touch with something ancient and instinctive in me, a reliable inner
sense of what to do in dangerous situations.

Just then, a voice came into my head, clear as sunlight. "Trust the
path," it said. I truly heard this, as a spoken sentence that seemed to be
coming from a deep part of me. But I smiled, scoffing at the idea. That's
the problem, I said to myself. There is no path. I trusted the Forest
Service trail and look where it got me. I've been looking for the path for
half an hour and it's just not here. And in the larger sense, in the big
picture of my life, over a period of years, I had also lost sight of the true
way.

"Trust the path," said the voice again, patient and true. In that voice
was a certainty that there must be a path, and that it could be relied upon
to do its job.

I looked down and saw a little groove in the weeds — an ant trail.
There, oblivious to my panic, ants were going about their tiny business in
an endless column. With my eyes I followed the ant trail, the only path I
could see.

It led me to a slightly deeper groove in the underbrush, a little trail
used by field mice and other small creatures, almost a tunnel through the
brambles. And soon that guided me to a broader path, a zigzagging deer
trail that climbed the mountainside in easy stages. I started putting one
foot in front of the other, following that trail. It led me out of the
labyrinth, like Ariadne's thread leading Theseus out of the maze. In a few
steps I came to a clearing, a mountain meadow were the sun was still
shining. Across the meadow I found a well-maintained trail and realized I
was back on an official Forest Service path, the right road, the way back.

As I walked along, calmer now, the way out of my personal confusion
became clearer. "Trust the path," my voice had said, and I took that to
mean "Keep marching ahead to the next stage of life. Don't try to go
backwards, don't allow yourself to get paralyzed or panicked, just keep
marching. Trust that your instincts are good and natural and will lead you

to a happier, safer place." Then the hiking trail merged with a fire road,
wide as two firetrucks, and in half an hour I was back on the highway
where my blessed Volkswagen was parked. The sun was still blazing on
the Western horizon, though I knew back in those canyons it was already
deepest night, and I could have died there.

As I looked back at the mountains and forest that had just held me in
their jaws, I realized I'd been given a gift with that phrase, Trust the Path,
and I pass it on to you. It means that when you are lost and confused, you
can trust the journey that you have chosen, or that has chosen you. It
means others have been on the journey before you, the writer's journey,
the storyteller's journey. You're not the first, you're not the last. Your
experience of it is unique, your viewpoint has value, but you're also part
of something, a long tradition that stretches back to the very beginnings
of our race. The journey has it own wisdom, the story knows the way.
Trust the journey. Trust the story. Trust the path.

As Dante says, at the beginning of the Inferno, "In the midst of life's
journey I found myself in a dark wood, for the right path was lost." I think
we're all doing that, in our various ways, finding ourselves through the
journey of our writing lives. Looking for our Selves in the dark wood. I
wish you luck and adventure and I hope you find yourself on your
journey. Bon voyage.