Structuring a story with the Hero's Journey

[droo_radley]

Hi everyone,

When I wrote Gloom and Doom I extensively based it on the Hero's Journey, but it wasn't like I just took the basic structure of Star Wars and then just changed the setting to include dragons - I followed the Hero's Journey in the way it takes the audience on an emotional journey that is logical and satisfying. I really feel that this is a good template to use for all kinds of stories, and not just those traditional epic ones. The "call to adventure" doesn't have to be a literal call to a literal adventure!

I made a video where I summed up what I learned about the Hero's Journey from all the screenwriting books I've read, and how I applied that to the writing of Gloom and Doom. I'd love to hear your thoughts about it!

[phantmoftheomsi]

That's a pretty clear summary. I liked the many examples you shared.

In my experience with Campbell's theories, I have found them less useful as an outline tool and more useful as a revising tool, retrofitting the plot to Campbell's structure once I have all the elements from a completed first draft. But I'm more of an exploratory writer, and most of my worst stuff was written when I was too far in my own head.

What's your take on Campbell's character tropes? A lot of screenwriting gurus whiz past that stuff in favor of story structure, but I have found shamans, zealots and shadow selves very instructive.

[droo_radley]

What's your take on Campbell's character tropes? A lot of screenwriting gurus whiz past that stuff in favor of story structure, but I have found shamans, zealots and shadow selves very instructive.

I love this stuff, and I think it's important for people to place their characters into archetypes... at least as an early step. The frequent argument against this is "I don't want my character to be some typical character - I want them to be unique!"

While I understand that, I think uniqueness is not the primary trait of a strong character, as I believe the top trait of a character is that they're serving the story you want to tell. Even if you're writing a character-driven story, the character's role is still to serve your story, not the other way around! A piece of writing that is all about a character without a story is a Dungeons and Dragons campaign book, not a narrative.

So much like how the hero's journey helps you set up scenes to tell a compelling story, understanding your characters as archetypes informs you of how they fit into your story and what purpose they serve to drive it. Like you said... it's instructive.

If the shaman character is meant to guide the protagonist on their early journey, then you know something is wrong if your character isn't doing that. And if they're not doing that... then what are they doing, and do they really still need to be in your story at all? In writing, there's no 50 point achievement unlocked for writing 20 or more characters with speaking lines.

Another argument is "Real people aren't archetypes. We're all unique!" which I think is wishful thinking. Looking back at school, you've always got a class jock, a class clown, and someone that looks just like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club. The class jock might not actually be a football player... they might be the popular debate team star, but they still fit into that archetype. Just as the class clown might have a deeper story about humor being a defense mechanism to hide parental abuse, but on the surface, there will still be that clown in your classroom making everyone laugh.

So if you really want to shoot for realistic characters in your story, then YES. There are archetypes in the real world, so just roll with it.

Within the context of a story, you might need a clown to lighten up the mood and balance against depressing, heavy characters. And that will be the purpose they serve. How you execute it is up to you, but every strong character in every compelling story ever written will be able to fit into an archetype. So I don't understand why anyone would want to break that just for the sake of breaking it.