Writers: A Tale of Two Journeys
I get it. Writing one hero’s journey is difficult enough, but two?
Yes, every memorable story has two symbiotic quests to challenge your hero, one external and the second, internal.
The external journey is the sequence of obstacles your protagonist must face, be defeated by a few times and then, eventually, be victorious over.
The protagonist’s internal journey is her emotional evolution, the process by which she learns of a personality flaw or untreated trauma that prevents her from becoming who she wants to be.
How your hero discovers her flaw and her reaction to that revelation are ‘why’ her initial efforts to achieve her goal fail.
The hero’s first reaction when forced to undertake the external journey of the story’s plot is driven by her as yet unknown flaw, and so it should play a role in why she fails. Even if the hero doesn’t see it, your reader should.
When her flaw is made clear to the hero, it is human nature to deny or ignore it, and this is shown as the cause of her next failure(s) in her external journey.
Even when faced with the truth of the flaw, the hero will likely try and circumvent her flaw’s influence or impact in a subsequent effort — usually around the mid-point — that fails spectacularly and forces the hero to choose between changing her flaw or abandoning her journey.
Only by accepting her flaw, choosing to overcome it and devising how to accomplish it will the hero ‘arm’ herself with the strength to face the confrontation of the climax.
Sound complicated? It is, I won’t lie, though I suspect a deep conspiracy exists to make the concept seem as complicated and unattainable as possible.
There’s a lot of advice out there about both legs of the protagonist’s journey, yet they are usually treated separately, when the key to understanding them is how each informs and depends on the other.
In this article I will map their relationship through the story’s progressive stages and then, hopefully, persuade you to reverse your approach to the story-crafting process.
In fact, if I do this right, you’ll feel as if an unknown weight has been lifted from your shoulders, or maybe your self-doubt will be less than it was.
Want vs. Need
How many times have you heard Mick Jagger sing, ‘You can’t always get what you want,’ but sometimes, ‘You get what you need?’
It took me a very long time to assimilate that, but it reveals the very essence of story. Ultimately, whether your hero achieves his goal is irrelevant so long as he learns what he needed to from making the effort.
To look at this another way, the hero knows what she wants but not ‘why,’ and her process of coming to understand herself better, or more completely, is what your audience relates to and this is the key to making them feel they’re a ‘part’ of your story.
Most writers start with the outer journey and then stumble because they can’t seem to stuff it with relevance. And no wonder. They’re doing it backwards.
The Power of ‘Inside-out’
I rarely begin thinking of a story as a protagonist doing something, as in undertaking a quest, and then trying to uncover why they’re obsessed with whatever it is they want, let alone framing it all in a theme.
Instead, I ask, what if a guy will throw anyone under a bus in order to look good? What flaw in his character could be responsible, or perhaps what type of earlier trauma in his life?
Maybe he was a victim of exactly that, and while he was thrown under the bus and humiliated for something not (entirely) his fault, the real culprit was hailed a hero. Or his father saw anything other than total victory as insufficient, that you had to win at any cost.
Let’s go with the ‘win at any cost.’ What if his win came at the expense of a group, a group he imagines himself to be part of?
A theme that pops up here might be: Belonging vs. isolation.
The Emotional Arc
There are six basic emotional arcs in narrative. I compiled them into this article:
I would choose the ‘Mode 3: Positive’ or ‘Cinderella’ arc, because it is RISE-FALL-RISE. My protagonist will sell out (intentionally or even accidentally) those dear to him and RISE before being shunned to FALL but then making things right to RISE once again.
Architecture in Story
Every building begins as an outline of stakes and string. These inform the location of the structural frameworks and excavations. Each completed stage determines and supports the next — no differently than ‘inside-out’ story-crafting — so the finished edifice is both structurally sound and visually beautiful.
The Unexpected Bonus
Now that you know your theme, your protagonist’s emotional arc and his inner journey, take a look in the mirror. What do you see?
Passion. Motivation. An appetite to tell this story.
Tell me I’m wrong.
Focussed Creativity
And it’s an appetite that will only grow with every ‘what if?’ you apply to the story. What character would best suit, what are the perfect obstacles that will force him to understand his flaw, accept it and then move beyond it in his emotional arc to make him a better person and improve his community?
By crafting your narrative inside-out, each decision follows on from the previous, and enhances the next. You never lose sight of what you’re trying to say, so you never get lost on this tangent or that and, most importantly, your hunger to write is never satiated.
