AUTHOR YOUR LIFE by Lara Zielin

I first met Ann Arbor author Lara Zielin years ago when she was on a YA author panel at Nicola's Books. Flash forward a few years and she had three published young adult novels with Penguin Random House and four contemporary romance novels written as Kim Amos. From the outside, she was living the writer's dream, but behind the scenes she was struggling on a very bumpy path that many writers know all too well. Read on to learn more about how Lara navigated these challenges by "storyifying" her life. She'll show you how you can do it too.

Writing Myself Into the Hero’s Journey: How approaching my life like a character on an adventure changed everything for the better

By Lara Zielin

At the start of 2018, when I wanted to change my life, I decided to do it through the power of storytelling. Here’s what I can say about January 1, 2018, when I started my own Hero’s Journey:

First, I woke up the heaviest weight I’d been in years. Actually, probably the heaviest I’d ever been. I can’t tell you what I ate that day, but I can definitely tell you I drank. Because drinking was something I found myself doing more and more.

And my work writing novels, which had once been thriving, had also dried up, leaving me questioning who in the world I was since being a novelist had been the only big career dream I’d ever had. It felt inextricably linked to my identity, and I was shuffling around, lost, without it.

I had a part-time job that kept a regular paycheck coming in and ensured we had things like health insurance, but the gigs my husband and I had started on the side—me a writing business and him an ice cream store—were often struggling. We were getting by, but barely.

“Storifying” Life

That’s when I went back to writing, but I decided to play with the fiction-writing process and the Hero’s Journey. I wanted to test whether writing about the life I wanted to have could actually help it come to pass.

So I began a book I unimaginatively titled Lara’s Life. Every day I wrote about myself like a character, and I wrote about the things I wanted to have happen to this person.

And right after I started, everything that I wanted to have happen came true immediately and it was super easy, THE END!

Haha, no.

Instead, what happened was the tried and true pattern of the Hero’s Journey. There were nearly predictable challenges that occurred as I worked to create a better story around my finances, my health, my relationships, and much more.

The amazing thing is that because I’d put my “life” into a story structure, I knew the challenges were coming. After all, as an author, I know the Hero’s Journey. I know the patterns and the obstacles that would challenge any protagonist, who in this case just happened to be me.

So when I wrote about Lara having more financial abundance, I was not at all surprised when our finances took a huge crap. When I wanted a better relationship with my husband, it’s no surprise that we suddenly had big huge boulders in our path that we had to push out of the way.

The Hero’s Journey Pattern

My observations about the Hero’s Journey have led me to conclude that it’s more than just the blueprint for good storytelling. Joseph Campbell himself, who popularized the Hero’s Journey in the 1970s, suggested it was part of our human DNA—that there was no other way to explain its prevalence across culture and time.

I’d actually go a step further and posit that the Hero’s Journey is a fundamental, unshakable law in the universe like gravity or the speed of light. Why? Because it’s repeatable. I’d say it’s even testable. When you start the Hero’s Journey, the same cycle occurs. Every time.

It’s not a monomyth that formed as a result of human activity over time, and it’s not something we’re supposed to study for useful nuggets, simply because it IS the nugget.

As such, the Hero’s Journey is a blueprint not just for fiction but for real-life, too. It’s the roadmap for what’s going to happen to you when you start creating the life that you want. It’s all the cards laid out on the table, telling you step by step what to expect.

Try This at Home, Kids

If you’re curious to try this for yourself, it’s pretty simple stuff. Get a notebook and grab a pen.

Title your story and write what you want to have happen to you, the same as you would a character in a story.

• How does this character feel?
• Where do they travel?
• Who are they with?
• How do they change for the better?

Don’t worry about plotting out the entire arc of the story. The arc will take care of itself. Just write every day like a chapter and put down whatever bubbles up in your heart.

This process changed my life and reignited my creativity. I believe it can do the same for you, too.

Lara Zielin is a published author, editor, and the founder of Author Your Life. Her debut young-adult novel Donut Days was selected to the Lone Star Reading List, and her romance novel And Then He Kissed Me (written as Kim Amos) was nominated for a Romantic Times Reader's Choice Award. Her magazine articles have appeared in Writers Digest, Culture, Medicine at Michigan, and more. Her nonfiction book Author Your Life is about using the power of writing to create a better story for yourself. She lives in Michigan with her husband and dog, and her goal is pretty much to eat ALL THE CHEESE.



Learn more:
https://www.authoryourlifenow.com/
https://www.facebook.com/pg/authoryourlife/about/

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