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[SPEAKER_02]: Season 21, Episode 4.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is Writing Excuses.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you constructing the hero's journey?
[SPEAKER_04]: Tools not rules, four writers, five writers.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm Howard.
[SPEAKER_02]: And today we are putting paid on tools, not rules, because we're gonna talk about the hero's journey.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I just need to preface this 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,
[SPEAKER_02]: 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
[SPEAKER_02]: But we're not here to present it to you, as I said rules.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're here to present it to you as a useful toolbox.
[SPEAKER_02]: And for me, I found that anxiety of influence always, always, always manifest less the more I know and the better I understand the thing that I'm afraid of.
[SPEAKER_01]: And just to underscore this point about tools, not rules,
[SPEAKER_01]: I have made it this far into my publishing career.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been doing this for 20 years professionally.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've edited hundreds of books at this point.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I don't really know what the hero's journey is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or at least like, I know it's like role in the conversation.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know sort of the, the, the, the, the, you know, meta structure of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But in terms of what the actual steps of the hero's journey are in terms of that strict application, and don't really know what all those pieces are.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so,
[SPEAKER_01]: I can see it's utility as a tool, but if you just need some reassurance of like, if you're carrying this conversation, you're like, oh god, I don't know what the hero's journey is.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not a writer.
[SPEAKER_01]: Please rest assured, many people don't know what it is, and that's a hundred percent fine.
[SPEAKER_02]: The, I mean, by way of definition, Joseph Campbell wrote, here were a thousand faces, first edition in 1949, and he was a student of comparative mythologies, and he studied a lot of mythologies.
[SPEAKER_02]: Did he study all of them?
[SPEAKER_02]: No, because that's way too big, but he studied enough to make a convincing case,
[SPEAKER_02]: based on Jungian psychology and Freudian psychology and a whole bunch of other cultural elements that were prelevant in his culture at the time made a very good case for.
[SPEAKER_02]: Boy, all of these mythologies seem to be tapping into some subconscious structure and that structure looks like
[SPEAKER_02]: this, and then he describes what this is.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it is basically a 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that is such a super ultra-condensed summary
[SPEAKER_02]: what's funny about the hero's journey the book or the hero of the thousand vases the book is that the after 1977 they started changing the covers to include include Luke Skywalker
[SPEAKER_02]: on the cover of the book because George Lucas was a big fan of this and incorporated these structures into Star Wars.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it's very easy to look at the heroes journey to look at the monomith and to say, oh, well, it's successful because it resonates with all of us and that's why Star Wars works.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's why Lord of the Rings works.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's why whatever works.
[SPEAKER_02]: because they were stories that were well-told.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are plenty of things that adhere to the monometh that are not well-told and that don't work.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, part of the reason I used all were so much as a writing example is because of this.
[SPEAKER_01]: 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
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I pushed back pretty strongly on the idea of the monomith.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there are lots of different story structures that we encounter in story, you know, from different cultures, from different perspectives.
[SPEAKER_01]: 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,
[SPEAKER_01]: pattern recognition is essential to storytelling, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, a lot of how human cognition is wired is to recognize patterns in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: We then see those and communicate those to other people in that storytelling in a very fundamental way.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, of course, there will be sort of nodes that appear stranger tractors within storytelling that will be dominated in one way
[SPEAKER_01]: We can also see that in something like, say, if the cat, we can also see that in sort of these, what's the Japanese structure that I always forget the name of?
[SPEAKER_01]: We should tend to, yeah, thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, I think it is useful to think about and talk about even though what I would really encourage you to not do is feel like you have to use this as a formula when writing your story in particular.
[SPEAKER_04]: 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.
[SPEAKER_04]: I just bounced away from it and this somebody who also is not a big Star Wars fan like I
[SPEAKER_04]: people often use that as like it's the great heroes journey and I'm like I hate it um 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
[SPEAKER_04]: like a departure is part of it, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: There's part of it is you leave the world you know and you go out.
[SPEAKER_04]: And while you could leave that world like 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.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so I think for me one way to
[SPEAKER_04]: wrap my head around it is when I want to write a story of journey, this is something to consider.
[SPEAKER_04]: 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?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: 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 call the arm bar, which is that you are propelled into your propelled across the threshold,
[SPEAKER_02]: because all of the other choices were bad, to use Star Wars an example, it's not until Uncle Owen and Aunt Baroo have been killed by the stormtroopers that Luke decides to leave.
[SPEAKER_02]: It is not until and when
[SPEAKER_02]: the Hobbit when Bilbo leaves.
[SPEAKER_02]: He has his whole dinner with the droves and he decides not to go and and then changes his mind in the morning.
[SPEAKER_02]: And again, using Tolkien, Frodo, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been rereading Lord of the Rings actually recently.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was working on a narrowed project early this year with a group of friends and had a long drive heading to do that recording.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I started listening to the audiobook of Lord of the Rings as preparation that because it was going to be a journey story, it was going to be the sort of classic.
[SPEAKER_01]: walking through the wilderness as so much fantasy is.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the thing that struck me was how long it takes Frodo to leave the Shire, you know, 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 writer 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.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's funny earlier today.
[SPEAKER_04]: I was joking about hero from heroes journey being an acronym because I have acronyms and I only got as far as the first three letters, but they were here.
[SPEAKER_04]: I am explosions run and so because I think a lot of times the explosions do not necessarily have to be literal explosions, but is the loss of family.
[SPEAKER_04]: He said in danger, the thing that that is the thing that propels you across the threshold and then you go running and I think you run away and then you run towards something else.
[SPEAKER_04]: So first you're running away from the danger and then you're running towards some new goal.
[SPEAKER_01]: I cracked it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh no.
[SPEAKER_01]: Apotheosis.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we should talk about that maybe what I was what I was going to say is oh no Hero only has four letters and there's way more pieces here No, we're gonna say we're done.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're gonna talk we're gonna talk about some of those pieces After after a break I said we were gonna talk about more of the pieces.
[SPEAKER_02]: I lied a little bit because I want to finish talking about this arm bar
[SPEAKER_02]: the part about the hero's journey that I think resonates with a lot of us is that unwilling hero.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because most of us, yeah, you'd have to twist my arm to send me on that kind of an adventure.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't want to go do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm very Hobbit-like in many, many ways.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, and so that resonates with us.
[SPEAKER_02]: 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?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, 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,
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm picking up my sword and I'm going to go do something dangerous and that's fine too.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's something I think about a lot and this comes up from TTRVGs is you run into a lot of things where like someone will make a character who's like, I'm a lone wolf.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't participate in friendship and doing stuff, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's sort of like you end up in this problem where the the the forward momentum of the story stops before it starts because one player will just say, I'm not going to do that thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the way I like to invert it is to think about this question of why not if, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're starting from this idea of if your protagonist participates in this, the answer is, they're probably not.
[SPEAKER_01]: They would rather stay home.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're scared.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're whatever.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not paying attention to the world around them.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you instead say, okay, they are going to do this thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Frodo is going to leave the shire.
[SPEAKER_01]: why does he do that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Not will he do that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Starting with the why will lead you to much more interesting narrative places and sort of unlock all the things that I cascade from that moment in a way that I think is way more useful.
[SPEAKER_02]: Makes sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the key pieces that for me identifies a thing as having been influenced by the hero's journey.
[SPEAKER_02]: is the presence of a mentor character.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And oh my goodness, we see this everywhere.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is Obi-Wan, this is Gandalf.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Why?
[SPEAKER_02]: Why do I try to look at that and say, oh, that's obviously heroes journey, but because if I take a step back, you know what?
[SPEAKER_02]: All of us, hopefully at some point, have had mentors.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a role that exists outside of this framework.
[SPEAKER_02]: The thing that makes the mentor,
[SPEAKER_02]: 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: Gandalf has to stay, has to fight a ballerog and say fly-u fools.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, Obi-Wan has to be struck down and say I will
[SPEAKER_02]: And, 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 meta predictor, totally.
[SPEAKER_02]: If the reader sees the mentor like, oh, that guy's doomed in act two.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, is that an effect we want in what are what we're writing?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, one thing I want to flag here is, you know, you you call this a meme, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's accurate.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a magnetic quality to these kind of structures, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: The this is the pattern recognition thing I always talk about.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is this idea of like you can see this metaphor for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's so many times I'm watching me being like, hmm, he's dead in the next scene.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or like, you know, it's like the the old cop being like, I'm gonna retire in two days.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're like, you are not making out of this movie, but
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, and I think the soldier looking at the photograph of his girlfriend totally.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the thing that I want to flag here is, you know, those scenes can be kind of corny, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes if it's too obvious, you know, field cheesy, it'll feel what people call quote unquote tropey, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And tropey doesn't mean that you're doing the thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It means that you're doing the thing badly in a uncomplicated or way that feels wrote and not
[SPEAKER_01]: rooted in the story in an emotional reality of the characters, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that's really important, but it's also important to do the thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Part of the satisfaction of being in a pattern is seeing the things complete, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the thing of like when you're telling a mystery story, if the Plaro figure doesn't stand in a room and put all the clues together for the reader,
[SPEAKER_01]: you're missing a satisfying part of the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: 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 the looking for that completion.
[SPEAKER_01]: What you want actually is that feeling of
[SPEAKER_01]: Figuring the thing out one page before the author tells you, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: The satisfaction, the ideal mystery conclusion or thriller conclusion is the reader figures it out just before they figure it out, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because then they feel smart and they feel like, oh, I can see all the pieces and then you get this satisfaction of
[SPEAKER_01]: the thing resolve it 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.
[SPEAKER_04]: 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?
[SPEAKER_04]: 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.
[SPEAKER_04]: So there's some way, it doesn't have to be the mentor, but to me what that role is is, how does the world make itself known?
[SPEAKER_04]: 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.
[SPEAKER_04]: And the mentor said demise or, you know, I don't know, like,
[SPEAKER_04]: leaves for another planet or whatever they do to make them unavailable is really about balance.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you start a story with reluctance, then you need to end with acceptance.
[SPEAKER_04]: I do not want to go in this journey.
[SPEAKER_04]: I am now the only person who can finish this journey.
[SPEAKER_04]: 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?
[SPEAKER_04]: You've had 25 years of experience.
[SPEAKER_04]: Seems like you would be way better choice than me.
[SPEAKER_04]: A person who started doing this three weeks ago.
[SPEAKER_04]: So they must be like taken out of the story.
[SPEAKER_04]: 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.
[SPEAKER_04]: So you have that resolution and how do I think about, how do I bring the world into the story?
[SPEAKER_04]: If I don't want to do it with the mentor, because it feels too tropey, do they, you know, in a video game, they just find like really detailed
[SPEAKER_04]: go through the dystopian end of the world who's still nicely let it out like day three the zombies attacked again Turns out they're allergic to water.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know what it is, but I'm being bitten by a zombie and writing it down for some reason Castle arg But each time those are still it's doing the same thing.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's just doing it a different way.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah
[SPEAKER_02]: One of my favorite examples of using the hero's journey, but using it in a way that surprises the reader, is the misfortune series by Brandon Sanderson.
[SPEAKER_02]: 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
[SPEAKER_02]: and the hero failed.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's why Ash falls from the sky.
[SPEAKER_02]: We had a hero's journey and we had this whole archetypical thing that fit on so many points.
[SPEAKER_02]: 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
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm taking a step back from any sort of deconstruction of Brandon's work using the hero's journey as world-building, 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a great way to very quickly ground your world and make it seem real without having to do
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, one thing I wanted to point out, you know, talking earlier about with patterns, what we want to see is the resolution, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: We want to see the core resolve.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a second way you can resolve an ascending scale, which is to break the pattern, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to go through the obvious resolution.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can invert it, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so when we have a pattern in story,
[SPEAKER_01]: It is 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.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, oh, either the monster's going to appear now or we're going to get a fake out and this isn't a whole other thing, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and I think those inversions can be just as satisfying as giving us the thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a moment in the Candy Land Remake, uh, director by Nia Dekosta,
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the main characters, like near the end of the movie, she opens a door to a seller, and you see this descending staircase into darkness that is like below this creepy building, you know the villain is down there, and she just looks down the hallway and says, nope, and closes the door.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is one of those like perfect inversion moments of here's the pattern.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're showing you the pattern of the your horror movie protagonist is going to enter a scary situation full of tension.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we see her say, I ain't doing that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's so satisfying.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so funny in that moment, because you can invert the trope in a really useful way.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when you're thinking about these tools, remember you can
[SPEAKER_01]: choose to deliberately use them or not use them.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you don't have it 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 gonna do this.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't know what you're doing.
[SPEAKER_04]: Speaking of knowing the pattern, I am curious, we made it through the beginning and then Ohno Apotheosis.
[SPEAKER_04]: But is there anything we missed on the back end?
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, I thought we made it through the first corner.
[SPEAKER_04]: I was like, we did not actually take up the call, nor did we resolve this situation.
[SPEAKER_04]: 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, if we need to do that now or yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I will go ahead and provide a graphic for our producer to post on the web.
[SPEAKER_02]: We built monomithlite for extreme dungeon mastery, which is super useful for storytellers.
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the things that gets left out of applications of hero's journey in story,
[SPEAKER_02]: is the, you know, it's described as a, you know, a circle, and apotheosis is at six o'clock, is at the bottom of the circle.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's this whole return, which has trials, you know, tri-fale cycle often, a recrossing of the threshold and a delivery of
[SPEAKER_02]: uh, the boon, whatever, you know, the magical McGuffin, uh, to the real world and the acceptance or rejection of that by the real world.
[SPEAKER_02]: That is something that gets left off because at least per Western storytelling, we like a narrative curve that climbs slowly and steeply
[SPEAKER_02]: and then falls off very quickly to, you know, resolution and day new month.
[SPEAKER_02]: 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's compressed, but it functions really well as the last half.
[SPEAKER_02]: In the Peter Jackson movies, they missed that altogether and still gave us five endings, but that's a separate discussion.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it felt like the right decision because going back to the Shire would have been way too much movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's one of the great sins of modern storytelling is there's no space for any more, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no space for us seeing the characters in their apotheosis.
[SPEAKER_01]: And after they've done the thing, one of my favorite books of all time is Robin McKinley's The Huron the Crown,
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of a spoiler, but like the whole back half of the book is after she does the thing, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: 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 or 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 one time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, we are far enough in that we need to cross threshold into homework.
[SPEAKER_02]: Have we a pothiosist?
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think we get to a pothiosist.
[SPEAKER_02]: If that, if that ever shows up, if that ever shows up in an episode, everybody alone.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, we've gone super Saiyan here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, is it homework for you?
[SPEAKER_02]: I want you to take, I want you to take an outline
[SPEAKER_02]: the heroes journey and we'll go ahead and provide one in the liner notes and just on a index card on a post-it note or something from memory right down as many stories, movies, TV shows, operas, whatever you can think of that adhere to this pattern
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, just as a mental exercise to see if, if the pattern, if you understand the way the pattern is being applied.
[SPEAKER_01]: This has been running excuses.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're out of excuses.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now go right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: For this episode, your hosts were Dung Wan Song, Aaron Roberts and Howard Taylor.
[SPEAKER_00]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Car Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds.
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