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Writing Excuses 21.04: Deconstructing The Hero's Journey 

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-04-deconstructing-the-heros-journey

Key Points: Departure from the real world, trials and apotheosis in the magical realm, and return to the real world. Arm bar, propelling the protagonist across the threshold. Hero: Here I am, explosions, run... The unwilling hero. Mentor! Removed before the final battle. Patterns need to be completed for satisfaction. The return! 

[Season 21, Episode 04]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 04]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Deconstructing the Hero's Journey. 

[Erin] Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And today, we are putting paid on tools, not rules. Because we're going to talk about the Hero's Journey. And I just need to preface this with... With a whole preamble about anxiety of influence and Hero With a Thousand Faces, and the fact that many of us look at this and think, man, I don't want to read that Joseph Campbell book, because then everything I write will end up conforming to this colonizing, culturally appropriating whatever. And you know what? You're not wrong about what the Hero's Journey might be. But we're not here to present it to you as a set of rules. We're here to present it to you as a useful toolbox. And for me, I've found that anxiety of influence always... Always, always, always... Manifests less the more I know, and the better I understand the thing that I'm afraid of.

[DongWon] And just to underscore this point about tools, not rules, I have made it this far into my publishing career, I've been doing this for 20 years professionally, I've edited hundreds of books at this point. I don't really know what the Hero's Journey is. Or at least like... I know it's, like, role in conversation, I know sort of the meta-structure of it. But in terms of what the actual steps of the Hero's Journey are, in terms of that strict application, I don't really know what all those pieces are. And so, I can see its utility as a tool. But if you just need some reassurance of, like... If you're hearing this conversation and you're like, oh, God, I don't know what the Hero's Journey is, I'm not a writer... Please, rest assured, many people don't know what it is and that's 100% fine.

[Howard] The... I mean, by way of definition, Joseph Campbell wrote Hero With a Thousand Faces, first edition, in 1949, and he was a student of comparative mythology, and he studied a lot of mythologies. Did he study all of them? No. Because that's way too big. But he studied enough to make a convincing case, backed by Jungian psychology and Freudian psychology and a whole bunch of other cultural elements that were prevalent in his culture at the time... Made a very good case for, boy, all of these mythologies seem to be tapping into some subconscious structure. And that structure looks like this. And then he describes what this is.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And it is basically departure from the real world, a... Trials and apotheosis in the magical realm, and a return to the real world in which gifts are or are not bestowed upon fellow people. And that is such a super, ultra-condensed summary. What's funny about the Hero's Journey, the book... Or Hero With a Thousand Faces, the book, is that  the... After 1977, they started changing the covers to include Luke Skywalker on the cover of the book.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because George Lucas was a big fan of this and incorporated these structures into Star Wars.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And so it's very easy to look at the Hero's Journey, to look at the monomyth, and to say, oh, well, it's successful because it resonates with all of us, and that's why Star Wars works. And that's why Lord of the Rings works.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And that's why whatever works. And the fact of the matter is those things work because they were stories that were well told. There are plenty of things that adhere to the monomyth that are not well told and that don't work.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, part of the reason I use Star Wars so much as a writing example is because of this. I mean, not just because I love it and know it very well. But it is just a useful shorthand in terms of this very iconic, sort of simplistic idea of what the journey for a hero is, or what this character arc can be. And I push back pretty strongly on the idea of the monomyth. I think there are lots of different story structures that we encounter in story, from different cultures, from different perspectives. I think there are lots of different types of stories that we tell even within Western culture. But I also have this strong belief that pattern recognition is central to storytelling. Right? A lot of how human cognition is wired is to recognize patterns in the world. We then see those and communicate those to other people, and that's storytelling in a very fundamental way. And so, of course, there will be sort of nodes that appear, strange attractors, within storytelling that will be dominant in one way or another, and we can see that in the Hero's Journey. We can also see that in something like Save the Cat. We can also see that in sort of these... What's the Japanese structure that I always forget the name of?

[Howard] Kishotenketsu.

[DongWon] Yeah. Thank you. And so, I think it is useful to think about and talk about, even though what I would really urge you to not do is feel like you have to use this as a formula, when writing your story in particular.

[Erin] Yeah, because I think it has... I think the Hero's Journey has a few, like, underlying assumptions. And I'm interested to find out more about sort of what it is, because I have also sort of bounced off of it. Even without knowing it, I just bounced away from it. And as somebody who also is not a big Star Wars fan, like, I... People often use that as, like, it's the great Hero's Journey, and I'm like, I hate it. And so I don't know as much about it. But I think part of the reason is that I get really interested in stories that are about people embedded within community. And to me, the Hero's Journey is a journey, and so it is a great... Seems like a great tool for the... Like, a departure is part of it. Right? There's... Part of it is you leave the world you know and you go out. And while you could leave that world philosophically or, like, emotionally, I think a lot of times in its traditional form, it is about physically leaving behind what you know, and going somewhere else. And so I think, for me, one way to wrap my head about it is when I want to write a story of journey, this is something to consider. If I want to write a story of being under siege or of remaining, maybe it's not the thing that I want to use. But it's a great way to think about where do you leave, where do you go, and what do you come back with.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] One of the commonalities in the departure, and it's not, again, it's not always this way, but it's very commonly this way, is a technique that screenwriters often called the arm bar. Which is that you are propelled into... You're propelled across the threshold, you are propelled into the adventure because all of the other choices were bad. To use Star Wars as an example, it's not until Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru have been...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Killed by the Stormtroopers...

[DongWon] Skeletonized.

[Howard] Yeah. That Luke decides to leave. It is not until... And when... The Hobbit... When Bilbo leaves. He has this whole dinner with the dwarves, and he decides not to go. And then changes his mind in the morning. And, again, using Tolkien, Frodo...

[DongWon] Yep. I've been rereading Lord of the Rings, actually, recently I was working on a narrative project early this year with a group of friends, and I had a long drive heading to do that recording and so I started listening to the audiobook of Lord of the Rings as preparation for that, because it was going to be a journey story, it was going to be a sort of classic walk into the wilderness as so much fantasy is. And the thing that struck me was how long it takes Frodo to leave the Shire. And how long that period is of him delaying and delaying and procrastinating and putting off this thing he's been told to do until the riders show up, until it is almost too late, and he's literally being chased and hounded out of this place of safety to go on this adventure.

[Erin] Yeah, it's funny. Earlier today, I was joking about a hero from Hero's Journey being an acronym...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Because I love acronyms. And I only got as far as the first three letters, but they were: here I am, explosions, run.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so... Because I think a lot of times the explosions do not necessarily have to be literal explosions, but it is the loss of family...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] The sudden danger, the thing that... That is the thing that propels you across a threshold and then you go running, and I think...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] You run away, and then you run towards something else. First you're running away from the danger, and then...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You're running towards some new goal.

[DongWon] I cracked it!

[Erin] Yes.

[DongWon] It's, oh, no, apotheosis.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And we should talk about that, maybe?

[Howard] What I was going to say is, oh, no, hero only has four letters, and there's way more pieces here.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] We are going to...

[DongWon] [garbled] That's it. We're done.

[Howard] We're going to talk about some of those pieces after a break.

[Howard] I said we were going to talk about more of the pieces. I lied a little bit, because I want to finish talking about this arm bar. The part about the Hero's Journey that I think resonates with a lot of us is that unwilling hero. Because most of us, yeah, you'd have to twist my arm to send me on that kind of thing, that kind of an adventure. I don't want to go do that, I'm very Hobbit-like. In many many ways. And so that resonates with us. Does it resonate with us because that is a grand pattern in the Jungian psyche? Or does it resonate with us because most of us like to sit at home and read books?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that it's possible to tell really good stories that begin with the hero saying, I'm picking up my sword and I'm going to go do something dangerous. And that's fine too.

[DongWon] And there's something I think about a lot, and this comes up from TT RPGs, is you run into a lot of things where, like, someone makes a character who's like, I'm a lone wolf. I don't participate in friendship and doing stuff. Right? And it's sort of like you end up in this problem where the forward momentum of the story stops before it starts, because one player will just say, I'm not going to do that thing. And so the way I like to invert it is to think about this question of why, not if. Right? If starting from this idea of if your protagonist participates in this, the answer is they're probably not, they'd rather stay home, they're scared. They're whatever. They're not paying attention to the world around them. If you instead say, okay, they are going to do this thing. Frodo is going to leave the Shire. Why does he do that? Not will he do that. Starting with the why will lead you to much more interesting narrative places and sort of unlock all the things that cascade from that moment in a way that I think is much more useful.

[Erin] Makes sense.

[Howard] One of the key pieces that, for me, identifies a thing as having been influenced by the Hero's Journey is the presence of a mentor character.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And... O, my goodness, we see this in... We see this everywhere.

[DongWon] This is Obi-Wan, this is Gandalf, this is... Yeah.

[Howard] This is Obi-Wan, this is Gandalf, this is... Yeah. Why do I try to look at that and say, oh, that's obviously Hero's Journey? Because if I take a step back, you know what? All of us, hopefully, at some point, have had mentors. This is a role that exists outside of this framework. The thing that makes the mentor character, the archetype, the meme for lack of a better word, so memorably identifiable in the Hero's Journey is that they have to get removed from the picture before we have our final battle. Gandalf has to stay... Has to fight a balrog and say, fly, you fools.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Obi-Wan has to be struck down and say, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. And that is... On the one hand, I mean, it's useful to know that tool, but on the other hand, it kind of becomes a metapredictor.

[DongWon] Totally.

[Howard] If the reader sees the mentor like, oh, that guy's doomed in Act 2...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Is that an effect we want in what we're writing?

[DongWon] Well, one thing I want to flag here is... You called this a meme. Right? And I think that's accurate. There's a memetic quality to...

[Howard] Yes.

[DongWon] These kinds of structures. Right? This is the pattern recognition thing I always talk about. And it is this idea of, like, you can see this mentor figure and there's so many times I'm watching a movie and I'm like, hmm... He's dead in the next scene. Or like... It's like the old cop being like, I'm going to retire in 2 days, and you're like, you are not making it out of this movie, bud.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And I think...

[Howard] A soldier looking at the photograph of his girlfriend...

[DongWon] Totally.

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] And the thing that I want to flag here is those scenes can be kind of corny. Right? Sometimes if it's too obvious, it'll feel cheesy. It'll feel what people call quote unquote trope-y. Right? And trope-y doesn't mean that you're doing the thing, it means that you're doing the thing badly, in an uncomplicated or a way that feels rote and not rooted in the story, in an emotional reality of the characters. Right? So I think that's really important, but it's also important to do the thing. Part of the satisfaction of being in a pattern is seeing the thing complete. Right? This is the thing of, like, when you're telling a mystery story, if the Poirot figure doesn't stand in a room and put all the clues together for the reader, you're missing a satisfying part of the story. If you're telling a romance, and there isn't a happily ever after, you're going to get yelled at by every romance reader in the world, because that is part of the pattern, and they're looking for that completion. What you want actually is that feeling of figuring the thing out one page before the author tells you. Right? The satisfaction... The ideal mystery conclusion or thriller conclusion is the reader figures it out just before they figure it out. Right? Because then they feel smart and they feel like, ooh, I can see all the pieces, and then you get the satisfaction of the thing resolving. Right? So you can sort of think of it as a musical scale or musical note. You want the thing to resolve in a satisfying way that feels inevitable but surprising.

[Erin] Yeah. And speaking of that kind of resolution, like, to really deconstruct the Hero's Journey, I was thinking that why does the mentor exist? And in some ways, like, the mentor exists because, as an author, as somebody telling a story, they are a vehicle to explain things, to give information about the world that someone who has been shielded from that world would never know. So there's some way... It doesn't have to be the mentor, but to me what that role is... How does the world make itself known in a way that is clear cut so that the person who is going through the journey understands what they're up against, how to do the thing that they don't know how to do, is given enough tools to put things together. And the mentor's sad demise or... I don't know, like, leaves for another planet or whatever they do to make them unavailable is really about balance. If you start a story with reluctance, then you need to end with acceptance. I do not want to go on this journey. I am now the only person who can finish this journey. And so the men... In order for that balance to happen, the mentor can't be there because they would be like, well, why don't you do it?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You've had 25 years of experience. Seems like you would be the better choice...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Than me, a person who just started doing this 3 weeks ago.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So they must be, like, taken out of the story.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] And so one of the things that maybe I'm taking from this is how can I, even if I'm not telling the exact Hero's Journey, look for ways to balance the way that a story begins with the way that it concludes, so you have that resolution, and how do I think about... How do I bring the world into the story? If I don't want to do it with the mentor, because it feels too trope-y, do they... In a video game, they just find, like, really detailed journal entries where people...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Going through the dystopian end of the world...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Is so nicely lettered out, like, day three, the zombies attacked again. Turns out they're allergic to water.

[DongWon] Day four...

[Erin] You know what I mean? So that you know what it is.

[DongWon] I'm being bitten by a zombie and writing it down for some reason. Why...

[Erin] Oh, no.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Castle Argh.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But each time... Those are still... It's doing the same thing. It's just doing it in a different way.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] One of my favorite examples of this, of using the Hero's Journey, but using it in a way that surprises the reader, is the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. Because the Hero's Journey, the pattern of the Hero's Journey, we discover on about, I think, halfway through book two. I forget, it's been a while, we discover that that thing happened and the hero failed, and that's why ash falls from the sky. We had a Hero's Journey, and we had this whole archtypical thing that fits on so many points...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And what we have now is a heist crew that is trying to make a living, and in the course of doing that, they are finding ways to maybe fix things. And so... I mean, taking a step back from any sort of deconstruction of Brandon's work, using the Hero's Journey as worldbuilding, using it as something that underlies a mythos, a religion, a magic system, whatever that your characters are aware of, but they are not following the pattern... That's a great way to very quickly ground your world and make it seem real without having to do a whole lot of heavy lifting.

[DongWon] Well, one thing I wanted to point out, I was talking earlier about with patterns what we want to see is the resolution. We want to see the chord resolve. There is a second way you can resolve an ascending scale, which is to break the pattern. Right? You don't have to go to the obvious resolution, you can invert it. Right? And so when we have a pattern in story, it's often... I have this thing when I watch movies where it's not that I know what's going to happen next, it's that I can see the range of possibilities. I'm like, oh, either the monster's going to appear now or we're going to get a fake out and this is a whole nother thing. Right? And I think those inversions can be just as satisfying as giving us the thing. There's a moment in the Candyland remake directed by Nia Da Costa where... One of the main characters, like, near the end of the movie, she opens the door to a cellar and you see this descending staircase into darkness that is like below this creepy building. You know that the villain is down there. And she just looks down the hallway and says, nope, and closes the door. And it is one of those, like, perfect inversion moments of here's the pattern. We're showing you the pattern of your horror movie protagonist is going to enter a scary situation full of tension. And then we see her say, I ain't doing that. And it's so satisfying and so funny, in that moment, because you can invert the trope in a really useful way. So when you're thinking about these tools, remember you can choose to deliberately use them or not use them. But if you don't have an awareness of what pattern you're playing into, it can misfire, because I will expect you to either do it or not do it. And then if you show instead that I didn't know I was setting that up, then I'm like, oh, you're not good at this. You don't know what you're doing.

[Erin] Speaking of knowing the pattern, I am curious. We made it through the beginning, and then, oh, no, apotheosis. But is there anything we missed, like, on the back end.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] We kind of missed...

[Erin] Also, Dong...

[DongWon] Yeah, I think we made it through the first quarter.

[laughter]

[Erin] We did not actually take up the call, nor did we resolve the situation. But I'm wondering if like... If there's a quick, like, for people who number one maybe don't know apotheosis or, like, don't know the rest, we need to do that now, or...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I will go ahead and provide a graphic for our producer to post on the web. We built monomyth light for Extreme Dungeon Mastery, which is super useful for storytellers. One of the things that gets left out of a lot of applications of Hero's Journey in story is the... It's described as a circle. And apotheosis is at six o'clock, is at the bottom of the circle. There's this whole return, which has trials, try-fail cycle often, a re-crossing of the threshold, and a delivery of the boon, whatever... The magical macguffin to the real world, and the acceptance or rejection of that by the real world. That is something that gets left off, because at least per Western storytelling, we like a narrative curve that climbs slowly and steeply to a climax, and then falls off very quickly...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] To a resolution and denouement. When you look at the print editions, the written version of Lord of the Rings, the scouring of the Shire functions really well as the last half of the Hero's Journey. It's compressed, but it functions really well as the last half. In the Peter Jackson movies, they missed that all together and still gave us five endings. But that's a separate discussion. But it felt like the right decision, because going back to the Shire would have been...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Way too much movie.

[DongWon] Well, it's one of the great sins of modern storytelling is there's no space for denouement. Right?

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] There's no space for us seeing the characters in their apotheosis after they've done the thing. One of my favorite books of all time is Robin McKinley's The Robin and The Crown, which... Kind of a spoiler, but, like, the whole back half of the book is after she does the thing. Right? The Hero's Journey part of it is only the first part, and then you realize that the Hero's Journey is actually the thing that happens after you do the thing. And it makes it one of the most interesting examinations of what it is to be a hero, what it is to do hard things, what it is to engage with the world that makes that truly one of my favorite fantasy novels of all time.

[Howard] Well, we are far enough in that we need to cross the threshold into homework.

[DongWon] Have we apotheosized?

[Howard] I don't think we get to apotheosis.

[laughter]

[Howard] If that ever shows up in an episode, everybody will know.

[DongWon] No, we've gone super sane here. This is it.

[Howard] Homework for you. I want you to take an outline of the Hero's Journey. And we'll go ahead and provide one in the liner notes. And just on an index card, on a Post-It note, or something, from memory, write down as many stories, movies, TV shows, operas, whatever you can think of that adheres to this pattern. Just as a mental exercise to see if the pattern... If you understand the way the pattern is being applied.

[DongWon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.