A Year of Showing My Work: Day 8

It was a busy day and I didn’t do a lot of work today. But I did do some thinking about my book. It gets me a little closer to what I want, although I still have a long ways to go.

I was listening to a podcast today in the car (The Story Grid with Shawn Coyne and Tim Grahl) and and it got me really thinking about my book and the direction I want to go with it. In this episode, one of the things they were talking about was the Hero’s Journey, a story form researched and discussed most famously by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The basic format of Hero’s Journey story goes like this:

1. A hero is called to adventure
2. At first the hero refuses, but then, for whatever reason, she changes her mind and accepts the call.
3. The hero embarks and encounters mentors who teach the hero what she needs to know in order to succeed
4. The hero works towards her goal
5. The hero accomplishes her goal
6. The hero returns to her original place, changed

You see this story everywhere. My husband and I have been watching Luke Cage and it’s there. I’ve been reading A Man Called Ove and it’s there, too. It’s all over the place.

It’s all over the place because it’s compelling. Joseph Campbell called it the “monomyth”. He traced its origin back to our earliest recorded stories.

So I’ve been trying to arrange my story around this structure, hang it off the framework like a shirt in my closet. It’s tough.

But that’s all just background. It’s interesting. But it’s background. What was I working on today?

I’ve made a lot of decisions about this book and I’ve changed my mind about a lot of those decisions, but one thing that has stayed with me from the beginning is the relationship between my main character Danni and her best friend Chris. These two have been best friends since kindergarten and from the beginning I have wanted their friendship to be the emotional heart of the story.

The thing is, Danni has never told Chris about her abilities. She can’t, she’s not allowed. No one outside of her family or the Coalition (the superhero organization that her family belongs to) knows. And now that she has to begin training, she is a lot more busy now than she was and Chris sees that and wants to know why her friend is changing so much all of a sudden. But Danni can’t tell her the truth, so Danni lies and Chris knows she’s lying, and it hurts. So Chris gives Danni an ultimatum: tell me the truth or we’re done. But Danni can’t tell her the truth.

So all that is well and good, I can get that far. But here’s the thing. Something has to happen to push Danni into telling Chris. What I was thinking about today is that she has to be defeated. Whatever it is she has to fight in this book, whether it’s Hazel or I choose something else, it has to beat her and she has to decide that she can’t do this without Chris. Chris is her rock, Chris is always thinking two steps ahead and is a wizard at finding information. She remembers everything. And whatever Danni’s trying to fight, she needs Chris’s brains because speed alone isn’t going to defeat it.

I just have to decide what “it” is going to be.