The Flat-pack Hero’s Journey is nowhere more prevalent than in the fantasy genre. It’s the not-so-secret formula to story telling. Once recognized, any novel, TV or movie has you mentally ticking the boxes on the check-list.
You find it in everything from Pride and Prejudice to Silence of the Lambs and individual episodes of Desperate Housewives.
You can blame Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero With A Thousand Faces, or its many adaptations, such as Christopher Vogler’s The Twelve Stage Hero’s Journey.
Robert McKee’s Story covers it at length. Derek Murphy defines an eight-step, 24-chapter structure for fiction. Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat screenwriting guide does it in seventeen beats. Joe Nasisse and Dan Wells distill story plotting to a seven-point structure to fit anything.
There and Back Again?
The minimized hero’s journey goes something like this:
- Preparation phase – meet the hero, setting, story problem
- Game changer 1 – an inciting incident, no going back
- Reactive phase – the emotional response to the incident; turn away
- Game changer 2 – focus on the story problem, encountering opposition
- Proactive Phase – seeking the solution. A try-fail cycle of small wins and set-backs, with rising stakes
- Game changer 3 – the protagonist’s lowest point, their ‘dark night of the soul.’ The final piece of puzzle emerges
- Conclusion Phase – the final battle
No Escape
Why does every writer use it? Because it works. It meets the emotional needs of an audience hard-wired for story. Dare to be different, you risk denying audience expectations.
The fantasy genre fixates on the Hero’s Journey as a vehicle for story. Fantasy authors especially cleave to this kind of mythic structure for novels. Meanwhile every wannabe screen-writer has some version of the Hero’s Journey beaten into them by colleges and courses. And, of course, saving Blake Snyder’s cat.
Formulaic sotrytelling. No originality. That’s why all Hollywood movies feel the same.
True you can sap the life out of an idea by box-ticking Campbell’s Hero With the Thousand Faces (looking at you, George Lucas), but what matters is a satisfying story shape. We want the ups and downs, setbacks and small wins in adversity before the big win in some form. Even if it’s just getting to the store to buy donuts.
Doesn’t work for tragedy.
Well… yes it does. You just get different outcomes at each stage. The ordinary world sets up the tragic protagonist’s discontent, then the inciting incident takes them down a dark path. The choices they make from then on opens their tragic flaw. The Dark Night moment is their shot at redemption, and they flunk it.
How does this work for a multiple-character story, example Game of Thrones? They can’t all be the hero on a journey.
GoT has a long narrative arc, so Martin can interweave multiple character journeys within it. And you can distil the hero’s journey down to a handful of tent-pole moments per character, you don’t have to write every step for every character. It’s a shared setting, so the setup affects different characters in different ways. Everyone is the hero of their own story. Including the villains.