Use whatever plot structure you want; story is more than a hero’s journey.
You can use Campbell’s seventeen-stages, Vogler’s twelve beats, or Blake Synder’s fifteen beats from Save the Cat. Try five tent-pole scenes or Dan Well’s seven beats. Three, four, or five acts, it’s up to you. As we’ve said before any structure is better than none.
Watch any competent movie or TV drama, you can count the beats as you go. And certainly you want a solid framework to fit audience expectations. We’re a species hard-wired for story after all.
But there’s more to story than mapping the beats.
More than just plot
The hero’s journey is all about plot. There’s a number of other elements that go into a satisfying story:
- choose your genre
- deliver on the genre promises
- develop compelling characters:
- protagonist,
- antagonist,
- secondary characters,
- world-build your setting (or a carefully edited and focused version of our own world)
- define your central conflict, both external and internal
- identify your theme
- lay out a series of escalating stakes
- ensure all these elements connect and pull together to produce a story that ‘works.’
Without compelling characters, nobody stays. Without a significant ordeal and an accompanying arc of change for your characters, nobody stays. This is what we mean by a ‘satisfying story.’
When stories fail, this is usually what’s missing.
The Journey not the Destination
We like competent characters like Holmes or Bond, but that only takes us so far. All adaptations focus on their flaws; obsession, addiction, loneliness. We’re glued to medical detective Dr. House for his flaws, his disastrous bedside manner, not his medical brilliance.
House is a better example than Holmes or Bond, as he has a running arc of self-therapy, with some kind of micro-arc of change with each case. And each case is a hero’s journey in itself. The all-important diagnosis hits about the same point in each episode. The clash with the hospital bosses are regular like clockwork. Most of his patients detest him at the beginning, but come around by the end. Those aren’t the reasons we stick around.
House is the outcast, the rebel, the trickster and the wise fool (or the foolish wise man). Medically brilliant, he is also anti-orthodoxy and anti-establishment. That makes him identifiable Everyman with relatable flaws.
With an episodic ‘illness of the week,’ the external conflict is the patient’s condition, plus the friction with his subordinates and superiors. The internal conflict is ‘physician heal thyself.’
We go along partly to see how he diagnoses the condition, but mostly to see how he fixes not only the patient’s problems but his own.
The story beats all fit within whichever structure the writers decide best fits a 42-minute running-time. We expect that of any competent production. But the satisfying parts of the story? Those are more than a hero’s journey.