The following is an excerpt from the "Way of Story Writing Course" on-line course. If you would like to enroll in the course, click here.

In the beginning was story. The caveman rushed back to his tribe and excitedly acted out his encounter with some Paleolithic beast. This was his story and forever after he would be remembered by this story. Every story has a sacred dimension not because of gods but because a man or woman's sense of self and her world is created through them. These stories orient the life of a people through time, establishing the reality of their world. Thus meaning and purpose are given to people's lives. Without story, we do not exist. The Way of Story is how we discover who we are.

EINSTEIN WAS WRONG

Einstein was wrong. "The world is made up of stories, not atoms," as poet Muriel Rukeyser once said.

Storytelling is not only the root of film, theatre, literature, and culture, but of the life experience itself. The listener maintains touch with his mythic self and the truths there represented. In losing touch with our myths, there may be a danger of losing touch with ourselves. Today, in modern society, there is a fragmentation which separates most of us from our central core or soul.

For thirty thousand years and in the earliest forms of oral tradition, shamans have tended the soul. The very word, shaman, coming from the Tungus people of Siberia, means excited, moved, raised. He journeys out of body to a realm beyond time and space. The shaman's soul leaves his body in trance state and travels to the underworld or skyward, returning with a message for the community.

What has this to do with us today? We have been split off from spirit since the Industrial Revolution, and today's Age of Information is a poor substitute for the callings of spirit. Information is not -- nor ever was -- wisdom. Knowledge is more than the mere naming of names, survival more than material sustenance. Man needs connection with the worlds of both matter and spirit in order find meaning and balance in life. In olden times, shamans interpreted psychological illness as separation from soul. The shaman's job then was to retrieve the severed soul and unite it -- or return it -- to the one possessed or ill.

The first purpose of writing is to clarify and reveal something in your self, but the only way to do this is to get it out of yourself. The second purpose of writing is to share it with others, providing a mirror for humanity at large, as a modern day shaman.

First, you must discover meaning for yourself in the story you have chosen and then find the necessary form that can be meaningful for others.