Writing with the Hero's Journey

What is the Hero's Journey?

I found a great article that included a discussion of how the hero's journey as formulated by Joseph Campbell and used as a pattern for Star Wars, Harry Potter, "The Book of Life," and countless other narratives, could be used as a basic pattern for powerful stories by any author.  In fact, Lucas had Campbell on hand for consultation to create "Star Wars: New Hope." The hero's journey is the basic plot line for stories used throughout the history of the world.  For a longer explanation, one can google or click on one of the links above.  

For Example: 

I'll go through the basics of this journey, using the recent Pixar movie "The Good Dinosaur" as an example.  The most recent Pixar movie didn't perhaps receive as stellar reviews as their other movies because it was A. targeted as a bildungsroman or coming of age flick to children--instead of toward an adult or universal audience--and B. not quite as rich in in dialogue as other Pixar offerings.  On the other hand, it does do a really nice job of the hero's journey, merging that pattern seamlessly with a dinosaur Western, a genre I, for one, have never seen anywhere.  

Spoiler alert, FYI.  The overarching theme is overcoming fear.  In the hero's journey, hero starts in the normal world.  In the case of The Good Dinosaur, the normal world is a land in which dinosaurs are western-style farmers, and people are wild animals. The main character in this movie is Arlo, a juvenile sauropod with an animal traveling companion who happens to be a human.  He refuses a call to adventure, to voyage outside his homeland but is forced into the underworld when his father dies in a flood.  He meets a cast of antagonists, including cattle rustling raptors and pterosaur desperados.  He also meets a seasoned traveler/guide, played by Sam Eliot--a famous actor in Westerns--a hard-bitten cowboy who imparts wisdom while training Arlo to face his fears through the tests he undergoes.  In order to reach home, Arlo faces ordeals similar to tests he failed earlier but succeeds this time, thereby overcoming what seems like certain death and emerging master of both worlds.  The movie does what one may expect of a Western hero's journey, and yet it has enough twists to surprise the audience. 

Universality

      As I said before, this basic story structure can be used in countless kinds of stories.  Clearly, the most obvious is the adventure saga.  But I used the themes and ideas as chapters for After the Dream, my first romance novel.  The entire novel did not follow the hero's journey, but part of it did.  The major pieces of the hero's journey became my guide through one of the most challenging parts of my book.  My chapter titles include: "Seasoned Traveler," "The Refusal," "Call to Adventure," "Sense of Purpose," "Road of Trials," "Underworld," "Fellow Travelers," "Tests, Allies, and Enemies," "The Ordeal," and "Mission Fulfilled."  Basically, this formula and its themes can be used in any context, in any genre.  

The hero's journey has been proven in everything from mythology to folklore to Hollywood.  It can give a sense of meaning and purpose to just about anything you want to write.  If something you're working on isn't clicking, incorporate some aspects of the hero's journey, and see if it can work for you.   

People-Watching and Finding the Voice

I just read an awesome blog by my buddy, Sarah Boucher, in which her friend, Terry Tyler, a fellow writer discusses how her character-driven fiction is inspired by people.  It got me thinking about how people watching helps me.  It also got me thinking about how people-watching can help me more.  In the past, I've jotted down snips of dialogue and taken notes over strange or inspiring things people have done or said.  I will have to go back to that.  It's a great idea.  J.K. Rowling has many times referred to how so many of her characters from Professor Umbridge to Harry Potter, himself, found inspiration from a real person.

How I've generally found inspiration in people for my novels is not necessarily specific observations about what they do or say but their emotional mindset.  It's how I capture voices.  In another of my blog posts, I discussed how I use the character theory of the Enneagram to classify people.  But I do something further in thinking through the people I know well and figuring out which person is EMOTIONALLY closest to my character.

I don't necessarily use the events of his or her life or their particular struggles.  Connor, the male protagonist from Pigs Fly, the book I'm working on, is a thrill seeker, someone who is driven to stay busy and look for the fun side of life.  So I looked through the people I know for a thrill seeker.  The person I chose is nothing like Connor, not even the same gender.  But that person gives me a voice to use when I write Connor.  Robin, my female protagonist, is a perfectionist, someone who lives her life by an internal code.  I chose another person I know to imagine when I write the voice of this character.  I had very different people inspiring voices in After the Dream, voices I knew very well because I heard them regularly.  These people would not recognize their lives on the pages of my books, but I'm hoping they'd relate to the characters.  Because if they do, other people like them will as well.

This method of selecting emotional and vocal muses from those I know helps me stay real to that character type.  This is how I find inspiration for the voice in my books.  It also helps with my sense of realism in general.  Sometimes, I'll even tell people whose voice I borrowed and ask them to read it to make sure the voice stays true.  I hope this helps someone.

Shakespearean Bits

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I would be employing Shakespearean plot points and scenes in Pigs Fly.  I've always liked Shakespeare.  I find it fun to do reads of the scenes from Much Ado about Nothing as if I were my characters.  So far, I have used a scene from it to have Robin, my female protagonist, insult Connor, my male protagonist.  It made a nice foundation for banter.  Last night, I found another useful scene with which Robin's friend can help her start to understand her real feelings for Connor.  Sometime soon, I'll use yet another scene for actual love declarations.  I may yet find other bits to employ.  So far, it's been exhilarating.

I said before that I would use major plot points, but I don't want to slavishly adapt the story.  First off, it doesn't make psychological sense to me that a basically nice guy would believe a rumor about the love of his life, that he would wait 'til his marriage to confront her about it, and that she would then be close to suicide because he criticized her in front of everyone.  Okay, maybe I could see it in Utah.  Maybe.  But then if this "nice guy" did all that, would his girlfriend then want him back later?  I don't know.

I don't really want to write about a "nice guy" who would do all that.  Maybe I'll revisit it with a real adaptation later when/if it does make sense to me.  Instead, I'm merging the bad guy who starts the whole drama and the "nice guy" fiance into a jerk who is trying to ruin Robin's innocent cousin's life.  I'm boiling down the cast of characters to the most essential, including the main two characters, the innocent cousin, and the bad guy, throwing in a few additional characters to complete the story.

I've read adaptations of Jane Austen novels in LDS fiction, but I have yet to find any Shakespearean LDS stories.  Maybe I'm missing something.  But it does seem like it's an area where there is space to explore.

Things I've Learned as an English Major

I've learned many things from becoming an English major.  This does not match everyone’s experience, but it rings true to mine. Here are a few of the things I've learned: 

   -A degree in English means I graduated with a BA in BSing.  I can read crap into ANYTHING.

   -Books and shows are for more interesting when you can read them two ways.  Like for instance, did you ever notice that the line "I'm underwater but I'm breathing fire" from John Legend’s “All of me” makes it sound like we’re listening to a dragon’s love song?

   -You gotta know the rules of English.  Then you can break them.  Whenever you want. 

   -An undergraduate degree in English plus $1.50 buys you a cup of your beverage of choice until the prices go up.  Then it buys you not much, even from a good school.  Unless you’re a teacher.  Then it buys you a membership in the really-educated-yet-underpaid-club. An MA in English may not qualify one for much, but it sure can DISQUALIFY one for some things by making one overqualified.  

   -A master's degree shows you even more than before that the world is a painful place for a grammar nazi.  "It's fewer than twenty!  Fewer! Not less than twenty.”   “Man, there ought to be a comma there.  WHY IS THERE NEVER A COMMA THERE?”  

   -You often confuse anyone but fellow English majors with your vocabulary.  One speaks the same language as other English majors.

   -You often learn less about how to use your own language in an English class than you do in a foreign language class.  Who knew? 

   -When you first take a college English class, everyone seems to know so much about everything.  Then you go to higher level classes, go back to those early classes, and realize no one has the slightest clue what they’re saying. 

   -The Harry Potter series is quite literary as you get toward the end with literary allusions, Christ figures, foils, and everything.  The earlier ones are great, as long as one ignores the adverbs. 

   -The world is just not the same when you learn to apply the phrase “phallic symbol” to everything.   

   -Student loan debt never dies.

   -I could have done my current job, making a decent middle class wage, without a degree.  Doh!  Of course, knowing my way around the language can’t hurt my ability to transcribe.  But it would have been nice to know.

What have you learned from your degree [or work]?

A New Character

One of my Projects: 

I mentioned in my last post that I'm working on a spin-off/sequel to my first novel, After the Dream, waiting to be considered for publication.  That spin-off is called Pigs Fly.  It follows the basic plot points of and employs lines from Shakespeare's Much ado about Nothing.  I hesitate to call it an adaptation, though it may yet be.  Connor, who plays inadvertent matchmaker in After the Dream, is one of the two protagonists here.  He has had miserable courting experiences, culminating in his fiance dying in his arms, and has given up on looking to get married.  He fills the empty spaces by frivolous dating and says he will get married when pigs fly.  Then he meets Robin, a female pilot with a pet pig.  Robin's mentor is Zeke, a black man who was in the Air Force with Robin's late father.  Robin and Zeke have become partners in a business in which they are copilots.

My Style: 

The way I tend to write is a technique I call quilt writing.  It's free flowing, especially while I'm writing scenes.  I get a basic story idea and write bits and pieces as they come to me.  Then I outline and reorganize as the story takes shape in my mind.  The fun thing about this kind of writing is I never know what's going to happen because it's not tightly planned in advance.  Just yesterday, a character I hadn't planned on introduced herself and seems to be interested in her own book.  This is part of the joy of working out characters.  The new character is Birdie, Zeke's adult daughter.

The Unplanned

I realized I didn't know Zeke well, yet I planned on a critical part for him in the book as Robin's father figure. So who is he?  I fleshed him out a bit and realized that he is the father of a thirty-something woman, a woman roughly the same age as my main character.  So with the way their fathers were best friends, she clearly had to grow up with my main character.  So Birdie needs to play a critical part in the book.  Which means I need to make the characters' voices even more distinct for a trio of best friends, Robin, Birdie, and Kristy, Robin's cousin and roommate.  Kristy has been the soft, gentle sort who can sometimes hold her own in banter with bitter and snarky Robin; however, with Birdie showing up, I need to soften Kristy's voice to complement the voice of saucy Birdie.  I need to make all three ladies' voices distinct and their friendship meaningful.  I like stories about female sisterhood and friendship, and yet I don't run into them all that often, especially in romantic fiction.  I don't yet know Birdie well, but what I know, I like.  She's an interesting mix of strong and humble, witty and full of integrity. She needs to be strong enough to help Robin see herself clearly when that is the last thing Robin wants to see. Writing is always an adventure.

An Introduction

ANOTHER blog? 

I have three other blogs, so a fourth might seem inessential.  But one is from the point of view of a cat, one is purely concerning mourning and only touches on writing as an incidental side note on occasion, and my primary writing blog is about general thoughts and tips to help and inspire other writers.  This one will get more personal about my writing and what I'm doing.  I will write shorter posts, but I will write them more often.  It will be a little like a writing journal with notes, thoughts, and progress reports.  I will sometimes include little snippets of writing or story starters.

My Writing Background  

For those who haven't read my other blogs, I'll start with a bit about me.  I've been writing since elementary school.  I started with children's picture books for my younger siblings, nothing special and mostly derivative.  In high school, I wrote poetry and my first novel.  I'm a little skeptical that fantasy novel will ever get finished because it is painfully cliched, boring, and just not very meaningful.  It was based on a role playing character I created when I was 10, and it was basically me in fantasy form: a  shy, blonde girl with an alien, telepathic, shape shifting cat in her backpack.  Her stories were elaborate and involved several characters, all of whom fed into a standard prophecy yarn. 

I spent much of middle school, all of high school, and into undergrad and even my master's program fantasizing about going back to that particular genre and story line.  My novel in high school was the first in the series, and a novel I wrote in college would have been the end of the series.  During college, I also started working on short stories, mostly with a sci fi or fantastic element, but always with some kind of insights on humanity.  That's when I started to get an inkling that fiction could be more than just a story on a page, something meaningful.  I submitted several of these short stories to writing contests, and some won awards and got some of these published locally.  I did the same with children's books I wrote during that time.  Meanwhile, I worked on my poetry collection, even taking classes to help in that endeavor.  I don't know if I'll go back to poetry, except in my personal journaling, but I am working on turning the women's experience/social commentary short stories into a collection called One if by Starlight.  I also published my undergraduate and graduate theses while I was working on everything else.  So I have quite a bit of writing but no actual long fiction in print.  It always seems like there are more urgent things to do with my time.  

The Change: 

All of this was fun, and I viewed it as a side hobby, something I'd do on the side.  Then my whole world was rocked to its core when my third child died.  I no longer waste my time on anything that doesn't have some kind of meaning.  I turned to LDS fiction, particularly though not exclusively, romantic fiction so I can deal with issues that have become central to my life.  I have submitted the first of these, After the Dream, to Covenant Communications and am playing the waiting game. I am also working on a fantasy/sci fi series for middle grades, aided by my children.  My boy insists that I must never work on these without child supervision.   

That is my writing in a nutshell.  All other entries in this particular blog will be shorter.  I invite you to come along for the ride.