writing from the themes of my life

I‘ve mentioned that I tend to bog myself down in perfectionism. And by that I don’t mean that I suffer from being too perfect – haha, no. I mean that I suffer from being too worried about the little things, and from being too hard on myself when I fail to attain some idealized conception of what each little thing ought to look like. Being overly conscious of the details is a double edged sword: sometimes it produces great results; other times it leads to paralysis. The bad news is that I still find myself paralyzed too often. The good news is that I was recently able to use this one of my character flaws as theme fodder for an exemplar I wrote to share with students as they worked on a mini-book writing project.

We studied mythic story structure as part of an abridged Synthesis Project that took about three weeks and wrapped up the year. Essentially, most students collaboratively wrote a long short story or short novella of eleven chapters based on Christopher Vogler‘s template of the following universal story pattern, (based in part on Joseph Campbell‘s works):

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