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.