The Hero's Journey revisited

I was reminded of doing my MA in Creative Writing this week when I went to the monthly Portsmouth Writers' Hub meeting.  One of my old tutors was giving a workshop about the hero's journey.

I did, many years ago, read Joseph Campbell's book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, but I have to say I found it a hard read.  And then I discovered Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey.  Based on Joseph Campbell's work, Vogler has distilled Campbell's work into an easily-digestible form for writers.

It's the structural form of the hero's journey which I find most useful for plotting stories.  I find it easy to keep that structure in my head when I'm writing. Oh, I'll think, this part is me setting up the heroine's Ordinary World, and this is the Inciting Incident which eventually forces my heroine into Crossing the Threshold into the special world of the story.

The structure is so useful for dealing with soggy middles.   If the story flags, it's time to introduce another Test.  In a novel you need several of them, rising to a Supreme Ordeal towards the end.

I find the structure very useful for checking my chapter outline before I start writing the story.  These days, I do very detailed chapter plans before writing a word of the novel.  In those plans I discover who my characters are, who the viewpoint characters are, and allocate viewpoint changes.  And what I've found while planning out the last two novels is that my pacing has been wrong.  In both cases, what I thought was going to be my Supreme Ordeal, the biggest Test which the characters will face, has come far too early, at about ten to twelve chapters from the end of the book.

In both cases that challeged me to find an even bigger Test for my characters to face three chapters  out from the end.  And, as I tend to be a bit of a wimp about writing death and destruction, it has forced me to up the stakes for the characters.  Some of them actually have to get hurt.

In the novel I've just finished I've had to add burning debris which threatens to kill people as my Supreme Ordeal.  And I've had to force myself to get two of my major characters seriously hurt.

The Writer's Journey is a very useful tool for writers, and by adopting this structure I can be confident that the pacing of my novels works.