Lesson One Preface: Accepting the Challenge
CONTENT GOALS:
- Understand the expectations and parameters
of the sensory description assignment
SKILL GOALS:
- infer definitions of vocabulary words in context
- analyze the expectations of the sensory decription assignment by applying word definitions to the writing prompt
- predict your performance on the sensory description assignment by analyzing your writing strengths and weaknesses
UNDERSTANDING GOALS:
- understand how descriptive writing appears in all writing
- understand the range of choices you have for a writing prompt
ESSENTIAL QUESTION:
- What will be the most meaningful writing topic for me that will best develop my writing skills?
The Writer's Journey: Accepting the Challenge
Do you ever daydream and feel the "writer's call" -- that urge to put words down on paper or up on a screen? Do you read a particular book, watch a film, see a drawing or sketch in a cartoon or on a Web site, and think, I want to create something like that? This impulse you feel is much like the call to adventure, otherwise known as the message that many famous heroes have received from human or animal heralds.
You are entering a prewriting phase where you will gather ideas in response to the challenge you are given, much like the departure phase of the hero's journey where the hero faces a challenge. Often the call to adventure is the writing prompt given by your teachers in school, by a standardized test, or by a course of study such as this one, asking you to write a certain number of words or paragraphs in response to a certain topic or question. You may not always enjoy responding to this kind of demand, but you know deep down you will ultimately benefit from this challenge. Likewise the hero's heralds might speak, sing, or even threaten the hero in order to get him to listen. Otherwise, the hero might not leave the known world for the unknown world, a place that promises her a future adventure in, as Joseph Campbell says, "a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground..."
Sometimes the call to adventure is a challenge you issue to yourself -- to communicate with people across the globe when you post to a blog, edit information on a wiki, create a personal Web page, synthesize information for a WebQuest, or craft an e-mail. Did you know that the same rules for writing that you'll be learning here apply to all writing, whether print or electronic, and to all audiences, whether friend or stranger?
During each phase of this course of study, we preface the phase with a reference to one or more famous heroes you might already know, fictional and real, who are known for their answers to the call to adventure. If you enjoy learning about heroes, read on. If you want to move ahead so you can immediately live out the action of your own quest, proceed to the next page.
The Hero's Journey: The Call to Adventure
When he tucks himself into his cramped room under the stairs, Harry Potter has brief escape from his lowly status as orphaned scapegoat. Daily he must dodge the abuse of his aunt, uncle, and cousin, the Dursleys. The letter that comes from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is his salvation, and Harry feels a joyful pull toward his true vocation. This school is exactly where he needs to be, where all his strange, inexplicable, magical powers can be put to good use. When the Dursleys try to prevent Harry from going, owls drop thousands more invitations upon the family's home, and Hagrid, a frightful but loving messenger for Hogwarts, pursues the Dursleys into the remotest of retreats until they relinquish Harry to the school.
Sometimes even the hero himself won't accept the challenge. In the first Star Wars: A New Hope movie, Luke Skywalker is very much the reluctant hero who feels that working on the family homestead on the desert planet of Tatooine ranks much higher than defeating enemies in outerspace he hasn't even met. When his mentor Obi Wan Kenobi invites Luke to fight the unseen enemy, Luke tells Obi Wan, "I can't get involved. I've got work to do." 
But when Luke's aunt and uncle are murdered by those very enemies, Luke discovers his only guide and hope now is Obi Wan and his only choice, to seek justice for these murders of his only family. Now he is ready to embrace a completely new task much more important than his work on the farm, a mission that is the battle against the dark forces of the Emperor.
The Indian hero Mahatma Gandhi also began his journey into heroic action with indifference and ignorance. He had never been politically active nor particularly bold until he experienced firsthand the racial discrimination common to life in South Africa. As an Indian male living abroad in South Africa, he was considered "colored" and therefore denied many freedoms and basic rights of citizenship when compared to white South Africans. In the face of such injustice, he began to rebel against such laws; the result was he was often abused. He was tossed out of a first class railroad car when he refused to move down to third class, and he was beaten by a stagecoach driver when told to ride on the outside footboard to make room for a white passenger who would get to sit inside. From these ignominous beginnings, Gandhi evolved into India's foremost political and spiritual leader for Indian independence from British colonial rule. He advocated nonviolent resistance using dramatic and peaceful protests, among many other strategies, and his actions inspired many civil rights leaders across the globe, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Gandhi came to be known as "Bapu" or "father of India." 
The hero's call is relentless. The hero and all who surround this individual must allow the hero to pursue the destined path or suffer the consequences. Once a hero has accepted the call, he or she will approach the mission according to personality type. Luke is certainly bold and reckless at times, but nowhere near as brash as his compatriots Princess Leia and Han Solo. On the opposite end of the spectrum in the robotic world is C-3PO, a droid who is paralyzed by caution and a foil to his daredevil counterpart, the adventuresome droid R2-D2. Like C-3PO, Harry is timid at best after the first overtures from Hogwarts, and it takes Hagrid, the monstrously tall but hugely generous man, to extricate Harry from the Dursley's prison. Mahatma Gandhi transformed from a mediocre student who struggled to launch a law practice into one of the most famous men of the 20th century.
Whether it takes a kick in the pants from the outside or a passionate drive from deep inside us, all of us jump into the hero's journey and the writer's journey with a sense of excitement, dread, confusion, and/or wonder. What will we discover next? And what sort of personality do you bring to this journey?
