Writing is a Way to Think Deeply and Find Others Who Do Also
Reading great works can challenge us or, by comparison, make us notice how little effort or attention span many people exert in their communications. How little precision. How little thought. Social media posts are 94% hit and run. Angry hot takes, many of which completely miss the point of whatever they are responding to.
But writing is another mode altogether. Clarity. Revelations. The first audience for anything you write is you.
Carol S Pearson's seminal work "The Hero Within" is filled with deep psychological revelations, the kind that come from years of writing professionally and working with others who do:
She analyzes the archetypal character arc used in most great stories. The protagonist goes through there archetypes in this order: the orphan, the wanderer, the warrior, the martyr. These correspond to the checklist used by Disney executives when evaluating potential projects:
Who is the Protagonist? = orphan, searching for the context of who they are
What do they want? = wanderer, searching for their purpose in this life
What stands in their way? = warrior, fighting and struggling to fulfill their purpose
What will happen if they don't get it? = martyr
She ties the wandering orphan phase to real life, uses a Carl Jung dynamic:
Ultimately we find revelation in our writing process. It forces us to look more closely at our lives and our role in it as parents, partners, helpers and mentors:
Thinking deeply is worth the effort. I really wish more people would do it.
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I am on writing journey right now. Trying to break through what has held me back. I have a BA in English Lit but reading and deconstructing is a different skill set than writing. Kind of like how you can be a passenger in a car without being able to drive or navigate.
I find it much easier to improve fiction that others have written, eg as editor, than to write my own. In my 20s I felt I had no trauma to base my fictions on but as another writer asserted "Each of us has experienced enough heartbreak by the age of 20 to write four novels." The trick remains translating that heartbreak. My excuse was that I did not want to expose my issues and life to the world. I am not Tennessee Williams.
But being nearer the end than the beginning of my life has brought urgency and honesty. The best reason to write anything is because you need to. Compulsion. Confession. Whatever the purpose, you seek answers through revisiting old stories with new eyes. Like the way a clam turns a painful grain of sand into a pearl, we polish our own suffering until it is good enough to potentially have value for others. (and 'value' doesn't mean money, unfortunately) 
I'm writing a short film I intend to make: An estranged father covertly, even illegally, helps his adult daughter until she finds out its him and pushes back. I'm trying to get it down to a quick tight and extreme version of the experiences of parenthood and adolescence. We parent not to hear "thank you' but because we have to. We are compelled to. In many senses it is more for us than for our children. OTOH, it lowers people's self-esteem to be helped and in that sense it truly IS "better to give than to receive." As Pearson notes, we need space in our lives to know that we are making our own choices and not being controlled, even in rebellion, by the expectations, needs and desires of our parents or mentors. There is enough in that to explore to fill a feature film but I think it can play nicely as a short. My goals is not to give the audience answers but to leave them with good questions.
An early version of the story got angry reactions from women. I knew the daughter was under-written and the ending was convenient (eg she tentatively forgave the father). I found the intensity of the anger disproportionate but it let me know that story was going to be good if I could get it right. I rewrote the outline 3 different ways, starting with making the daughter the protagonist. That helped greatly. Then I stewed on where this story was really coming from in me. Got that answer. Now I have an outline that I think is the winner and will tweak and test and finish writing it but I still want to leave room for the actress to bring her emotional truths to that character.
As the saying goes "Growing old is mandatory -- Growing up is not". I'm last in the birth order, a "baby", and we stereotypically want two things: to entertain people, and to have everyone get along with each other. My maturity has lagged but I don't want to leave this life without a few more answers and writing has become a way to find some of them.
Ty for sharing about Pearson's books.
And I found one of hers at my library.
https://www.carolspearson.com/free-books-3
I just bought her 1998 book "Hero Within" on Ebay. She is 81YO and still at it.
The history of women in early film making has been minimized and eclipsed by dozens of docs on "the moguls". Women were thought to be better story tellers than men were (imagine that ) and they were better paid. I am seeking more perspective for the project I am currently working on and that brought me back to Pearson.
I'm a big fan of Jung & his contemporaries, but I'd never heard of Pearson.
I love the Jung Platform, loads of on-demand courses. They're doing their big annual sale, 40% off sitewide! I loaded up on the creativity ones & am esp looking forward to watching the Find Your Myth one!