The Villain

A narrative is driven by the behavior of the villain. The villain defines the nature of the conflict. Every story has a villain. When you can identify your villain, this nasty character who tricks you into being less than yourself, then you can begin to defeat him.

I was going to write about the Trickster archetype. But when I did some research I found that he is an anti-hero who wins the day by using wise deception. The prominent example is Prometheus. Prometheus is the Greek God who stole fire from the Gods and gave it to human kind. Much good came from his actions.

So I am not talking about Tricksters, I am talking about villains. Villains mean you no good. We have all had interactions with a bully and some have met with the Devil. This guy is charming and gives people what he thinks they deserve. There are also outcasts and others with malevolent motivations.

To write your story using traditional stories as a template. You can make your Villain be anything you want. He or she can be a dragon, troll, queen or black wizard. The important thing to remember is that the motivation of your villain is key to his power and your struggle. The Villains motivation is part if the concerto that is your narrative. Villains are motivated by feelings of being outcast. This is often combined with a fervent belief in a cause. Many times villains are just mean because they are mean.

If for example, your story was about a struggle with drug abuse, the villain might be a dark magician who a skilled at slight of hand. He offers glitter and joy but delivers only smoke and mirrors. Often a villain will begin by providing a needed service and end up trying to take your most precious possessions. Just as Rumplestiltskin help the hero spin straw into gold but then demanded her first-born child in payment. Sometimes he villain is just greedy and wants what the hero has.

Bringing the Villain into your story brings the narrative to life and provides you with the chance to identify the problem without identifying with the problem.

The next challenge then is to identify and develop the tools that the hero needs to overcome the villain.

Ritual and Narrative

A good friend of mine, Greg Griffey mentioned the relationship between our narrated lives and ritual. One of the many ways that our culture works to help us to satisfy our need for order and understanding is by providing moments of ritual. We are all aware of the large rituals of our lives like christening our children or getting married. We also have many less noticed rituals. For many this is a small daily ritual that helps a person to feel on track and solid for the day. The ritual I like in the morning after waking up, is brushing my teeth and having a cup of tea from my favorite mug while I feed my cat Morgan.

What I have noticed is that our culture is full of missed opportunities for ritual and because we miss them, our brain does not solidify the event and we often lose it. Missed opportunities for ritual cause us to lose our moments of insight and understanding. Their are times when we realize that we are moving into a new awareness of the way we think about our learning but we cannot grasp the moment because rituals are not available.

In learning to tell your story, there are several places that call for moments of ritual. If the ritual is missed, then the story gets stuck.

The story can get stuck in the beginning and never get told.

It can get stuck in the place where you acknowledge the tricksters that you struggle with, but fail to follow through because your deep understanding was not solidified with ritual.

It can get stuck if you are prepared to give up the struggle and embrace being in relationship with the moment, but forget to let the ritual bind your mind to the new you.

Rituals need to have personal meaning and personal power. Some of the big rituals like a graduation tend to feel like an overwhelming experience being imposed on the graduate. It seeds real change in self-perception from outside the self.

Rituals can be personally meaningful and empowering even when they are small family rituals. For me, when I was a child, each year, late in august, my mother and I went out and bought new pencils and notebooks and paper and a few new outfits too. This ritual provided me with a fresh clean slate for a new school year where anything can happen. This was a wonderful ritual of beginning. The smell of the new paper in those fresh spotless notebooks filled me with images of a year filled with bright clean new ideas and numbers. Even the other children would be washed anew after a summer full of sunshine and vacation.

As adults we often don’t honor a new idea or mindset with enough ritual to keep it from fading into old habits and into a sea of no change. Ritual helps us to grasp the awesomeness of a new adventure. Ritual helps us to be empowered to act on our new agency.

The final ritual from learning to write your story is the telling of it.

More about this later.