Hero’s Journey, khichdi, and that little gremlin called “Story”

Life is not a pleasant place. Far from being safe and cool as the castles of Disney princesses, life is harsh, and brutal. Especially for those who dare to dream. Blunders happen. Fears take you over, and you freeze like an iceberg. To blend in with the world, you start walking around with a face of ice and eyes left glassed out with numbed emotion.

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

Huh, huh, huh, humans!

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

And then, there are humans. The world is rumbling with humans who try to pull you down each time you struggle to rise and fulfil your life’s greatest purpose, something that not only makes you happy but is also the best and the most right thing for you. They will pick on your self-doubts, greatest fears, insecurities, hesitations, conflicts and confusions, and use these as hooks to pull you into their own mind matrix, something you didn’t subscribe to. In disguise of “inspiration,” people will often attempt to spoil the little joys, sometimes going all the way to disrupt your life path with barriers that you could have easily avoided. Those that were just a waste of time.

 

The great hoggy-poggy soup (khichdi)

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

All these blunders, pricking humans, voices of your mind, fears, insecurities, envies, and failures blend together to form a hoggy-poggy soup (khichdi!) that slowly drowns you, so you forget the real purpose of why you are doing what you are doing.

But wait, there’s good news. Simmering and bubbling within the depths of this khichdi is a little gremlin creative writers call “story.”

 

That little gremlin called “Story”

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

Story, this little animal, is the journey a hero navigates to overcome the obstacles, barriers, and challenges laid out by the villain. For a hero, villain is an “angel in disguise.” He is the messenger and catalyst that cooks up this khichdi for you and then drowns you in and then highlights to you “obstacles” that will help you find a way out of this khichdi. 

Writers, there’s a bonus!

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

If you happen to be a writer, this entire khichdi episode turns out to be a “bonus,” because once you start noticing this tug-of-war happening between the hero and the villain within your mind, you put yourself on the seat of a storyteller. If you are attentive enough, you’ll end up receiving the bonus of a story (although it might take another few years for you to learn how to put it out in your notebook!).

 

Hero and Villain: The Great Devastating Combo of Story

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

The moment a villain pops up into the picture, the hero has to emerge. And the moment both of them materialize on the canvas of your mind, what happens then is called a “story.”

 

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

Now the villain will do his best to hinder the hero’s pathway with obstacles, barriers, and challenges. Drama will unfold, event after event, scene after scene. The journey that the hero will traverse to overcome the challenges posed by the villain will become the story. His journey, both inner and outer, will make up the skeleton of the story.

Now, a story doesn’t imply a hero, but a hero and/or a villain always implies a story.

 

Listening to the gremlin

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

In my own writing journey, I’ve come across zillions of obstacles, both in the inner world and the outer world, that have fueled my interest in this little gremlin called “story.” From feeling depressed after noticing beginner writers churning out thick novels in their first attempt to creeping out at my bizarre writing struggles to loathing at my gigantic lack of pure talent, I have traversed a long way. And all the while, this little gremlin has stayed with me, following me like a shadow, hovering above my shoulders, trying to tell me something, in hush whispers and tranquil bleats. Sometimes, terrifying screams.

For long, I dismissed its screams. But then, I decided, to listen. To shut my mouth, roll my sleeves, and just listen.

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

When I gaze into the abyss of mind and listen to what this tiny gremlin has to say, I realize how fascinating this hero-villain story archetype is. It is the type of a story every human can relate to. The human mind, in itself, is a background for the hero and its corresponding evil twin, the villain.

 

Mechanism of a Hero-Villain Story Archetype

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

Google says that this hero-villain story archetype is “one of the most fundamental and enduring structures in narrative across all forms of literature, myth, and film.” The core mechanism, according to Google, of this story type is based on two factors: “polarized conflict” and “mutual definition.” To put it from a spiritual perspective, this type of story stems from the feature of human mind called “duality.” In this case, this is the duality of the hero (light) and the villain (shadow).

 

The Hero (The Protagonist)

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

The Hero is a character who functions and operates on the “good,” “conscious,” or the “positive” side of life. He rises to the challenge posed by the villain to restore the balance or improve the world. His journey often involves “inner transformation” alongside external battles. Sometimes, the role of the hero might be to protect or sustain a code, or return to a state of normalcy or order, or achieve a greater goal.

 

The Villain/Shadow (The Antagonist)

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

The Villain, in contrast to The Hero, is his “shadow.” He represents the duality of life. He indicates all the weirdness and darkness that lurks beneath the positive/good façade of the hero, the mud that makes the hero, the hero. Without the existence of this villain, the hero wouldn’t exist. They are two sides of the same coin. He represents all the unobserved fears, desires, hatreds, anxieties, and hatreds that secretly boil within the deepest trenches of the hero’s mind.

 

So while he reveals them to the hero, the agitated hero undergoes annihilation while traversing a journey of transformation. Joseph Campbell named this process “Hero’s Journey.”

 

Hero’s Journey

According to Joseph Campbell’s concept of Hero’s Journey, outlined in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, this hero-villain story is constructed in three main stages: stages—departure, initiation, and return, collectively called “monomyth.” The hero receives a “call to adventure” that beckons him to leave their familiar world. They may refuse the call, but then they cross the “threshold” and this marks their initiation on the “road of trials.” Aided by allies and catalysts, they confront their greatest fears and challenges, ultimately returning to the ordinary world with a gift or bonus that will restore the balance of the world.

 

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

The Hero represents the human ego striving for self-actualization and integrating the conscious and unconscious. The Hero’s existence is the very threat to the identity of the villain, something that forces the conflict.

 

Villain: Mirror of the Hero

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

In the words of Carl Jung, the villain represents the “shadow” aspects of a hero’s personality. He manifests as the “mirror or the distorted reflection of the hero.” Disguised as power play, revenge seeking, chaos, and a twisted sense of justice, a villain actually proves to be the greatest “motivation” for a Hero to navigate his journey and arrive at the goal. The Villain actively attempts to thwart the Hero's quest, often forcing the Hero to face their greatest fears or moral limits.

 

The Hero-Villain Dynamic: Conflict and Mutual Definition

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

The relationship between a hero and a villain is symbiotic, where each character defines the other. Unless the hero integrates and assimilates the shadow of their denied and unlived potentials, depicted by the villain, the journey will continue to unfold. And this little gremlin called “story” will continue to scream and bellow in the  writer’s ears.

 

The Matrix of Morals

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

Another element of this dynamic is “moral ambiguity.” In Moby Dick, for instance, Captain Ahab is driven by an obsessive, destructive quest for revenge, which challenges the moral position of the protagonist. The villain could also be an impersonal character, or the destructive force, like the Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. In this case, the hero isn’t fighting against one particular character, but an entire system or matrix.

 

Credit goes to Gemini pundit

Personally, I have never written a story based on this hero-villain story archetype, but as I jot down these thoughts, on a blissed-out Saturday evening, my writing muscles are already clenching with the desire for writing one. (In this case, the writing muscles are the hero and the procrastination is the villain. Let’s see who wins!)

Read more writings on the topic of "Craft of Writing"

The Memory Palace technique of Storytelling

 The Memory Palace Method of Storytelling

 

If the mind was an abandoned palace, and the hero of the story was thrown away into that palace, what he would do? He would walk through the palace, explore it, investigate the details, and ultimately, find a way to escape and return to his original world. The technique of “Memory Palace” allows your characters to do just that.

 

“Memory palace,” also called as “Method of Loci,” is a creative writing technique used to remember vast amounts of information. In storytelling, the technique can help the writer craft a character or even the entire story by delving into the intricate structures and mechanisms of their mind.

 

The technique relies on putting the character in a tangible, imaginary landscape and then scanning different parts of that landscape, investigating what part mirrors which aspect of your character’s personality.

 

It could be a real or imaginary space, such as a library, a museum, a fantastical castle, a garden, a hilltop forest, a shop, a market, or anything. Consider this place as your “Memory Palace.” The next part is to walk through different parts of this “memory palace” and look deeply. Each part of this imaginary palace represents a different aspect of your character’s life or a major theme of your story.

 

A kitchen might serve one purpose while a bookshop the other. A garden might serve one purpose for the character while an airport might open up interesting possibilities for you to take your story forward.

 

If you are willing to delve deeper, you can also assign different imaginary objects in this imaginary landscape to represent or explore different attributes of your character or storyline. The object could be a simple as a blade of grass or a wall clock.

 

Consider this example: Lila’s Memory Palace

 

Lila sat at her desk, the blank pages of her new notebook yawning before her like an abandoned attic. She wanted to write a list of goals, tasks, and to-dos to organize, but what she really desired was to carve out a picture of her life’s universe. When swarms of thoughts buzzing and rumbling in her head became too noisy for her to actually jot down any words in the notebook, she closed her eyes and started an inner journey into the halls of her “Memory Palace.”

 

The Grand Hall

Sitting at her desk with closed eyes, in a meditative mode, Lila took a mental trip into the “Grand Hall” of her “Memory Palace.” A giant silk banner unrolling before her on a wall and an enormous wooden table in the center were some of the details she could see. On top of the table was a glowing orb. Taking a mental note, Lila placed her ambition on this orb: Write a novel. At this point, the character of the writer had set an intention to accomplish a goal.

 

The Conservatory

The next room in Lila’s Memory Palace turned out to be her “Conservatory,” a garden where she stored all her creative ideas and projects. While walking in this garden, she imagined a giant blank notebook in place of the soil. Suddenly, the blank pages began to sprout with colorful flowers, grasses, tiny bugs, and trees, that represented ideas, stories, and the projects she desired to work on.

 

The Library

The long corridor of “Library” in her “Memory Palace” was sprawling with shelves of books. These, however, were not typical books. In Lila’s inner world, each book represented a collection of memories, dreams, desires, thoughts, everything she liked or disliked, loved or hated, the chronicle of her individual self.

 

The Observatory

Finally, Lila stepped into the “Observatory” of her “Memory Palace” and started peering through the telescope to project her greatest and the best self in the stars and the galaxies. A famous writer with dozens of successful, published novels, a house filled with pieces of art, a mini library of her own, a garden of solace.

 

By the time Lila opened her eyes, she had navigated a landscape in the “Memory Palace” of her mind and now she was ready to jump into her notebook and scribble down all the details she saw in that dark, inner world, tell a story no one but only she could see. 

The best place to be...

 

The best place to be in…

 

The moment when you feel like you have nothing to write, is the very moment you should start writing, because this “nothing” is the gap where a treasure trove of words are awaiting for you to wake them up so they’ll tell you about their pains and stories, and like a diligent transcriber, you’ll take the dictation and copy their dialogues and monologues and whisperings and sweet nothings in your notebook.

 

This “nothing” is the best place to be in. Within the inky abyss of this nothing-ness lays asleep a colony of creepy little monsters, also known as “words.” Some of these monsters had been sleeping in this n-cave for, probably the past billion years. Nobody ever tried to wake them up, partly because they had no idea that they even existed. It wasn’t until these crazy person called “writers” finally slumped down on their desks with their notebooks or laptops perched in front of them.

 

For at least half-an-hour, the writer gazed at the blank page, rolling her sleeves, clenching her lips, tightening her belly, flitting her eyes from side to side in agitation, until, quite suddenly, some blurry images of these monsters starting materializing in her brain. And she was jolted in a shocking curiosity that caused her to become even more restless than she previously was. Who are they, she was left wondering.

 

Her attention kept on flipping between the blank page and the images of these monsters. Nothing seemed to work. Life was approaching an impending doom and her dream of surpassing the success of JK Rowling was already shattering in front of her eyes. So, the writer stood up from the desk, despondently walked to the kitchen, and made herself a glass of coffee. As molecules of dopamine rushed into her brain, she felt hopeful, again.

 

Nothing could be gained by abandoning hope. So, she kept sitting there, gazing at the blank page, her curiosity for knowing the monsters was dwindling away with each passing moment. By the time, the glass of coffee was slurped down till the last bubble, she stood up again. She slapped the notebook cover, shutting the blank page, vowing to never come across it again. The world was always right. Writing was not for everybody. And she was not one of the lucky ones.

 

After this horrifying encounter with life’s brutal hopelessness and a depressing realization, the writer resigns herself into exile. She steps out of the house to wander like a stray dog in the park and sit on the grass with closed eyes.

 

As she sat with eyes closed, all she could see was darkness. It was a place called “nothing.” The writer had already resigned to her hopeless fate, which helped her surrender much more easily to this n-zone. For the first few minutes, nothing remained nothing, nothing but the ever pervading, empty, silent darkness. But then, something happened. The sound of a bird. A bird flitted past her, likely flying towards the nest for the night.

 

In that moment, a word materialized in the n-space, in this boring, bizarre place called “nothing.” A spark flickered in the darkness, dimly lit. At first, there was one word. But as the writer kept sitting there, still hopeless, another word materialized. Then another, and another, and another….

 

Suddenly, the writer’s head was rumbling with an entire forest of words, desperate and agitated to tell their stories, their pains, their lost loves, their unfulfilled desires and terrors. As the words pulled the strings of the writer’s attention, she had no choice but to run, to run fast and reach her desk. So she ran and like a car suddenly pulling the brakes, she hurried to the desk and like someone who has been possessed by a ghost, she began tapping the keyboard keys, taking dictation from these word monsters and collecting their stories in the empty ocean basin of the blank white page. The blank page was no longer blank, thanks to that place that nobody likes to visit, that everyone is terrified to visit, a place called “nothing.”

 

For others, this place is of no particular significance whatsoever.

But for a writer, this is the best place to be.

 

Nothing. The best place to be. 

Understanding the “Iceberg Principle of Storytelling” With example of “Simi’s Memory Journal”

Let’s take the example of a fictional novel called “Simi’s Memory Journal.” Here are some excerpts from “Simi’s memory journal” a diary in which this character records her memories, feelings, details of everyday experiences, dreams, fantasies, obsessions, ideas, notes, observations, and just about everything.

 

October 17^th – A recurring dream

"The old house again. That creaking floorboard in the attic. Always the same grey light filtering through the dusty window. The hum of the old radio, even though I know it's been broken for years. The same old crow and its same old caw-caw."

November 5^th – An observation

“A woman in the bus caught my attention today. Her amethyst-colored scarf reminded me of my mother. For a split second, I almost reached out to her to ask who gave her this scarf.”

December 12^th – A cryptic note about the memory of a past event

“He said the words, but I heard something else entirely. The way the fierce winds whipped and the way the rain lashed against the window that night, mirroring the storm inside."

January 28^th – A note about an artistic obsession

“Spent hours on the sketching of the peepal tree. Its roots seem to hold so much untold history. Like an old woman's hands."

February 1^st – A fleeting feeling

"A sudden, overwhelming sense of loss today. For what, I can't pinpoint. Like a phantom limb."

 

For the reader, these entries are like the “tip of the iceberg,” while the bulk of the iceberg has been hidden by the writer. The writer’s intention is to leave it to the reader to decipher, decode, infer, interpret, and imagine the details hidden in these excerpts. This, in a writer’s world, is called as the “Iceberg Principle of Storytelling.”

 

The Iceberg Principle of Storytelling, also known as the "theory of omission" or "iceberg theory," was famously championed by Ernest Hemingway. It suggests that the true meaning of a story should not be immediately obvious on the surface, but rather implied through carefully chosen details and what is left “unsaid.” Just like an iceberg, where only a small portion is visible above water while the major chunk of ice remains submerged and hidden from the naked eye, the most powerful aspects of a story are those that the writer allows the reader to infer and absorb on their own.

 

The principle relies on some fundamental elements such as “show, don’t tell,” “Hint, subtext & implication,” “focus on the concrete,” and “trust in reader’s intelligence.”

 

Show don’t tell

Instead of explicitly stating a character's emotions or the story's themes, the writer instead uses actions, dialogues, and sensory descriptions to evoke these emotions and themes indirectly.

 

Hint, subtext and implication

The real drama often lies in what is hinted at, in the unspoken tensions, and in the gaps the reader is encouraged to fill.

 

Focus on the concrete

While applying the iceberg principle, a writer uses specific, tangible details to suggest deeper meanings, rather than abstract explanations.

 

Trust in reader's intelligence

The author doesn't spoon-feed information but trusts the reader to connect the dots and engage actively with the narrative.

 

Simi’s entries are just the tip of the iceberg visible to the reader. It’s upto the reader to interpret them as they like.

 

For example, the small detail of the “Amethyst Scarf” in the above excerpts hints at the character’s profound longing for or a unresolved relationship with her mother. The immediate reaction to reach out to the woman could be understood as emotions like grief, regret, or a yearning for connection.

 

The recurring “Old House Dream” could represent a deep-seated memory or trauma associated with her past, possibly her childhood home or a significant event that occurred there. The creaking floorboard, the grey light, and the broken radio could symbolize decay, unresolved issues, or a sense of something lost or broken.

 

The Cryptic Note "He said the words, but I heard something else entirely" could imply a significant personal conflict, a misunderstanding, or perhaps a betrayal in a past relationship. The rain mirroring the "storm inside" underscores the emotional turmoil she experienced. The reader is left to wonder who "he" is and what "the words" signify, prompting them to imagine the full context of that difficult conversation.

 

The peepel tree obsession and Simi’s intense focus on it could be interpreted as an affinity for endurance, resilience, and perhaps the burdens of history or experience. The comparison to "an old woman's hands" might allude to her own feelings about aging, wisdom, or the weight of her memories.

 

The bit about the Phantom Loss could be taken as an "overwhelming sense of loss" that she can't pinpoint, likened to a "phantom limb," implying a deep, pervasive grief or unresolved emotional wound that continues to affect her, even if its origin is buried. It hints at a past trauma or significant absence that has become part of her identity.

 

The Iceberg Principle of Storytelling, therefore, transformed an ordinary narrative of Simi’s memory journal into a portal that can potentially take an attentive reader into her vast, complex, hidden inner world, where they can catch a glimpse of her deepest desires, fear, loves, and all things she said or didn’t say, her unspoken fantasies. This makes the simple chronicle of her journal into a compelling narrative and a powerful, emotional story.

 

40 Insightful Quotes About Fiction from Famous Writers-Storytellers!

A work of fiction, in writing or otherwise, is a creative concoction of characters, settings and scenarios which are all, but only illusory formations carved by the function of human mind called as ‘imagination’. Yet for most humans, storytelling forms the make-up of majority of our life’s time.

Stories!

These fabricated vistas, slapped with wodges of tremors, trepidations and sensations; trammeling with shams of ideas and waves of emotion lapping through…Stories are those quirks of tricks and lies, in the backdrop of which, lurks a still quietude of the emotional center that hums and rustles in the heartbeats of its truest readers and listeners.

Discover below, a collection dazzling with forty insightful quotations from some of the greatest writers-storytellers, on the topic of ‘fiction’. To read all of these in one go (with background music!) begin straight from the following video, or skip through this to read them one by one. Yowzers!

#1 Fiction is the truth inside the lie. – Stephen King

#2 Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't. – Neil Gaiman

#3 Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth. – Khaled Hosseini

#4 When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction. – Steven Wright

#5 Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

#6 What I’m looking for is nothing but a touch of verisimilitude, like the handful of spices you chuck into a good spaghetti sauce to really finish her off. That sense of reality is important in any work of fiction, but I think it is particularly important in a story dealing with the abnormal or paranormal. – Stephen King

#7 Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth. – Albert Camus

#8 The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. - Tom Clancy

#9 This moment will just be another story someday. – Stephen Chbosky

#10 After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world. – Philip Pullman

#11 The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. - Muriel Rukeyser

#12 The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. – Jean Jacques Rousseau

#13 Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible. - Francis Bacon

#14 Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. ― Arthur Conan Doyle

#15 There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth. ― Doris May Lessing

#16 Stories are the wildest things of all, the monster rumbled. Stories chase and bite and hunt.” ― Patrick Ness

#17 Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream. ― John Cheever

#18 Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories. ― Hilary Mantel

#19 That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth. ― Tim O'Brien

#20 Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. – Haruki Murakami

#21 Fiction is the truth, fool! – John Waters

#22 A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth. ― Diane Setterfield

#23 Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. ― David Foster Wallace

#24 Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. ― Virginia Woolf

#25 Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale. ― Gabriel García Márquez

#26 If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats. ― Richard Bach

#27 The point of stories is not that they are objectively true, but that the soul of the story is truer than reality. Those who mock fiction do so because they fear the truth. ― Cassandra Clare

#28 Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different. – Neil Gaiman

#29 Escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real. – Neil Gaiman

#30 I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time. ― Diane Setterfield

#31 Fiction should be a place of lollipops and escape. Real life is depressing enough--I, for one, don't want to read about make believe misery, too. ― Nicole Christie

#32 Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. ― Michael Scott

#33 As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency. ― Slavoj Žižek

#34 It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth. - Gao Xingjian

#35 Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. - Simone Weil

#36 Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction. - William Blake

#37 It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. Mark Twain

#38 Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us. – Paul Theroux

#39 Beyond the fiction of the reality, there is the reality of the fiction. ― Slavoj Žižek

#40 Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else. – George Orwell

Thank you & Good day!

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