Straight Outa Wakanda: Lifewriting Live!

Greetings, Stephen Barnes. Here in this time of plague at the Wakanda Hilton, I decided to shelter in place here in my second home, my second country. Luckily I have my dual citizenship, so I was able to just fly in. T' Challa was very, very kind about it, made room for me and Tananarive and little kid Lip and all is well. So just wanted to let you share the wonderful view out the window. Isn't this beautiful? This is wonderful. And what I wanted to talk to you about was something that has been happening over the last 30 years. It came to fruition yesterday. As always, this is a presentation of a life writing live. If you enjoy this, please share it. It's the only way we know which which presentations are working for you, which ones you find attractive and wonderful and useful. So let's see. I want to take a tool from the 5 Minute Life Hacks, the life writing system. 5 Minute Life Hacks is just kind of one of the ways that we promote these things to people. We share them with you. This one is the Hero's Journey. We've talked about it very much and in many ways it's the backbone. The Life Writing system. It was the first piece of it. Now the Hero's journey is based on Joseph Campbell's model drawn from many cultures around the world. This is slightly my version of it. There are many different versions of it. And mine is you have a character who's confronted with a challenge. Initially they reject it, then they're allowed to accept it. They set out on the road of trials in which they meet allies and gain powers. They have their initial confrontation with evil in which they're defeated. That leads them into the dark night of the soul. They take the leap of faith. And if they take it properly, they do everything else properly. They confront evil again. This time they're victorious. And the last step is the student becomes the teacher. Okay, so once again, introduce myself. My name is Stephen Barnes, New York Times best selling writer, lecturer at the Smithsonian and Minsa. And I've been doing this for a long time. But the 3,4 million words of published fiction is nothing in comparison to the most, the proudest accomplishment of my life, which is my children and my wonderful wife. I'm also a martial artist. You guys know about that. But today we're talking writing. So I have to go back more than 30 years in order to start this. Thirty some years ago, I tried to sell a story to a television series called Purple Heart and they rejected it. And because of some things that happened there, it Hurt me very badly. It took me a year, actually, I hurt myself, to be really honest about it. It took me a year to heal myself from that. And I've talked about that at another time, but let's just say that that stayed with me. That experience stayed with me. And the fact that this story, which, you know, was praised by Harlan Ellison as well as other people, was in my head, in my heart. I wanted to get it out. It represented failure to me. Okay, so years passed, and maybe 10 years ago, I had the idea for a collection of short stories, basically a graphic novel, E.C. you know, tales from the Crypt. Vault of horror sort of stories, science fiction, fantasy, horror, that on one level were just nasty little stories, interesting little stories, clever little stories, but on another level, represented the Eightfold path to awakening as found in Buddhism. You know, right speech, right right action, right thought and so forth, right occupation and so forth and so on. Extremely complex project with philosophical levels that I could grasp, but I could not really teach about because I'm not a Buddhist. But 20 years ago, I met a gentleman named Charles Johnson. He was at a Go On Girls Book Club. My wife was being presented with an award. It was a huge affair. And there I met Charles, who's a National Book Award winner, teacher of Seattle University. Dr. Charles Johnson, Dr. Of philosophy, you know, longtime martial artist, just, you know, and a devout Buddhist. So he. It did not occur to me at that time, it did not occur to me immediately that I could work with him on this because, you know, frankly, he was a literary lion. And the idea of working with him, you know, I'm just a working writer, you know, in comparison to that, it was, you know, that's the voice in my head. Right. So we became good friends. And like I said, I came up with this idea for the Eightfold Path. And eventually, after he and I had written together on a couple stories and it sort of worked, I decided, well, you know, let me pitch this to him. I pitched it to him, and he liked the idea. So, you know, so we're talking about, you know, confronted with a challenge to do the Eightfold Path, reject the challenge because of fear and confusion, accept the challenge, feeling that the. That if I did it, it would represent a change for me. It would represent a movement forward in my life and then the road of trials, which is, how do I do this? How do I gather the allies and the powers necessary to do this? So once I had an idea how to do it, because I knew that the two of us together could definitely pull this off, it Was a matter of finding the way to market it. Because if you build it, they will come. No, they won't. They have to find out that it's there. So who can help me market it? Who can help me put it out? I don't. I can't draw. I mean, Charles can draw. He was a professional cartoonist, but he's not going to do the art for this. But he could talk to an artist. He could speak the artist's language. And so I knew that we could have a very successful experience, you know, with the two of us, if we could find the right ally. And that right ally became John Jennings. It's John Jennings doing macroscope. He's an artist, an artist and a teacher and now a publisher with his own imprint. This design specifically to bring people of color and marginalized peoples into the mainstream. He's doing some work with Octavia Butler, with Nnedi Okorafor. So he seemed to me to be the perfect person. He had been kind enough to allow us to interview him for our Afrofuturism class. So I pitched him this. And he loved the idea. He pitched it to his people. Took some time to get it through because the concept is complex. It's not just a graphic novel, it's a graphic collection that has thematically linked. Nobody had ever done anything quite like this to my knowledge. Maybe something like the Martian Chronicles, the Illustrated Man, Maybe. I don't know. So. And since I love Bradbury, it's a little testament to, you know, shout out to one of my most important mentors in context. If you don't know that story, I'll tell you that one another time too. So we're on the road of trials now. So it's a matter of, okay, breaking it down into its component pieces. It's still complicated. Break it down again. Every time you look at a problem from a different perspective, the problem seems to me to simplify. So we would use post it notes and three by five cards and whiteboards and sheets of graph paper and manila file folders. You know, just, just. How do we organize this? How do we organize this? How do we organize this? We used telephone and Skype and zoom and email. I would fly up there and meet with him, you know, renting an Airbnb so we'd have a place to conference together. And we got the structure together. And then it was a matter of creating the stories one story at a time. All eight of them. All eight have to be synchronized in some very specific ways in order to make the project work. Okay, so Confronted with the challenge, reject the challenge. Accept road of trials, allies and powers. Confront evil and defeat it. Now, there was a point that was the greatest point of loss, greatest point of disappointment, and that was really connected with that story 30 years ago. For some reason, that one just kicks my butt. Possibly because there's so much fear attached to it. I don't think it's that. It's that complicated. You know, it's hard for me to say. There were some things that had some problems that needed to solve. And what I found during most of the process was that if I had a problem I couldn't solve, I would simply believe that the next day that problem would come to me. So I'd ask myself, I phrase that question that, you know, frame that problem as clearly as possible before I went to bed, sort of tasking my unconscious mind to work on it. And in the morning, usually I wake up and have the answer. Sometimes I didn't. Sometimes it would take a couple of days of that. Sometimes I had to rephrase the question. Sometimes I had to take a break and do something else or just take a day off completely. But what I found was that the problem always solved itself. So it took me maybe two days to. When Charles looked at that one story and said, this one isn't ready yet, it took me two days to kind of swallow my vomit, because all the fear stuff, the doubt stuff, the voices in my head, came up at me. But the way through the dark night of the soul is the leap of faith. Now, faith is always faith in one of three things. Faith in yourself, faith in your companions, or faith in a higher power. And in this particular instance, faith in myself. I've been through this process many times, published many millions of words of writing. I understand this. You know, it's hard. It's just work. It's just work. You do it, you do it, you do it, and you get the breakthroughs after you've done the work. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do, and then the breakthroughs come. Faith in my companions. Well, I knew that if I couldn't do it, Chuck would help me answer the problems. Or Tananarive or Larry Niven, I can call him and say, listen, how would you solve this problem? That problem? So I knew that I had the allies, I knew I had the powers, and I had faith that, you know, the third thing is a higher power. You know, faith in yourself, faith in your companions, faith in a higher power. The higher power in this instance was that sense that this project is Something I'm supposed to work on this project is something that's important. It's going to enable me to not only complete one cycle in my life and open another one, but to communicate with people. Some things that I find to be actually important, actually valuable. So I had all three going on. It's that sense of the universe wants me to do this. So if you take that leap of faith, if you've found your companions, if you've committed, if you've dealt with your fear, then the next step is you confront evil. And this time, you succeed. Yesterday we turned in the first draft. You know, it's 160 pages, something like this, of text, but it will break down to probably about 250 pages of text and art. There's still work to be done. I'm too verbose. Need to cut down the text balloons and dialogue balloons and allow the art to express itself more. The art still needs to be done. And then there'll be promotional things and editing things and rewrite things. But this part of it is like dragging a marble up from the quarry. What's left after that is chipping away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. Okay, so we're now not just chipping away. Most of the chipping is even done now. We're polishing. Okay. And this is a beautiful place to come to. It is so satisfying emotionally. And so the last step, student becomes the teacher. So I get to, you know, it's also the movement to the next level. I get to move on to the next level, the next project. I got a couple projects I'm going to work on today. I'm also just going to goof around today because it's the sixth anniversary of Captain Winter Soldier, and I'm going to have a date with Tananari. We're going to kick back and watch it together. It's also. I get to teach you how to do this. How? I took a massive project that had been sitting in my head for 30 years. It was connected with a lot of pain and doubt and fear and break it down into small chunks. And to find the allies that I needed and to find the powers that I needed, find allies with those powers who could either have those powers or could teach me those things. You know, the Buddhism aspect of this, you know, it's great. You know, Charles Johnson is an actual Buddhist, who's. He's a scholar on this. He's written books on the subject, as well as meditating daily for decades. So he's perfect for this. You see you find you'd find the problems and you find the people can help you. And then you ask, I kept asking people, can you help me? Can you help me? Can you help me? And then eventually somebody said yes. Okay, so that's all I wanted to share with you today. You know, in a year, year and a half, you know, I'll have a copy of the book, but right now I'm going to move on to other things. And when that next thing comes, I'll divide that into its component parts and I'll define there what it is that I need and I will deal with the stress and the fear. There's always going to be fear if it's going to be something big that could change your life. So you need to, to own your fear, to not allow the fear to stop you, to understand that fear is just energy and to turn that fear into energy. The way you do that is with the five minute miracle, for instance. That's one of the things. There are other techniques, of course. You can find out about that@www.diamondhour.com. once you've got that, you have to create a daily ritual that allows you to take that energy and pattern it so you can have one perfect day after another. I didn't have to try to do this whole project at one time. It was just get this day right and then tomorrow, get this day right and then tomorrow, get this day right and the morning ritual, the daily ritual, the warriors ritual, however you want to call it. You can find out more about at www.fiveminutelifehacks.com. and if you're ready for the big leagues and you want to get it all together at the same time, our very best course would be the Warrior's journey, which you can find at www.realwarriorsjourney.com. thank you so much for joining us. I'm going to now celebrate a well deserved rest. I'm going to have a weekend. Oh my God. I got a weekend. Yeah, yeah, I get a weekend. So thank you. You know, from here in Wakanda, I think I'm going to go out and play with the rhinos or see what Sherry's up to. And you take care and as always, stay safe, my brothers and sisters.