Charlie Stross
#writersCoffeeClub 9/8: The Hero's Journey is garbage. Discuss.
I avoid writing Hero's Journey narratives because they're deterministic. If the reader recognizes it, it drains the novelity out of a story and turns it into a Plot Coupon Quest—in which the protagonist has to ramble all over fantasyland, collecting magic Plot Coupons, until they have enough to send off to the Author for an Ending.
NB: it's OK to run something that initially looks like a Hero's Journey then takes a surprise twist.
Madeleine Morris
@cstross I think the biggest problem with the Hero's Journey is that it was study meant to describe a common narrative structure that spanned stories from all over the world. When people began to use it as a guide, it became a problem. Reverse-engineering might be handy, but not sublime.
For many, there's an emotionally satisfying landscape to stories that roughly follow this structure, but if emotional satisfaction is all a writer is after, then just rewrite fairy tales over and over.
Madeleine Morris
@cstross I do wonder if - and I'm just speaking for myself here - it is a sign of privilege and relative comfort that I enjoy being haunted by non-happy endings.
Madeleine Morris
@cstross If I'm completely honest, happy endings do not haunt me. I love stories that stick with me a long, long time. None of them have happy endings. Some have tragic endings. Most have ambivalent endings.
But I do wonder if, as life begins to feel more precarious to most people, the craving for a happy ending becomes more acute.
Charlie Stross
@Remittancegirl Correct. (There's also the distinct and somewhat less familiar Heroine's Journey structure, but reusing it runs into the same problem eventually.)
Sevoris
@Remittancegirl @cstross reflection points: I‘ve found that I struggle to take away agency from protagonists. It makes me at times viscerally uncomfortable. I‘m okay with people struggling with their own internal incongruencies. And I‘ve had the sneaking suspicion that this has to do with my own struggles for agency against external circumstances.
ploum
@Remittancegirl @cstross : the point is that there’s a huge market for throwaway books that repeat the same familiar, feed-good story.
Some would say that this is the majority of books (and movies).
If you want to sell your story to Hollywood execs, following the Hero’s journey is probably a good idea.
If you want to create something original, it worth studying The Hero’s journey in order to not repeat it unconsciously (as we have been nurtured with books/movies from this cannon)
Charlie Stross
@ploum @Remittancegirl Naah, for Hollywood, Hero's Journey is old; these days it's all Save The Dog (or whatever cult formula came in after that, there's a new one every generation).
epw
@cstross It was eye-opening for me to try reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces and not just derivatives. It's obsessed with Freud! I had always heard things like "the Father is metaphorical" but the original is very clear that the gender of each character matters immensely, for Freudian reasons. It really undermined my remaining faith in the system.
Then I learned about kishotenketsu and how the Hero's Journey doesn't actually work to describe many stories anyway.
Philip Jarnhus
@cstross wouldn't this be true for any plot structure or character arcin its purest form? I tend to think of them as useful tools for a subset of the novel and then layering them all together to create a more complex, unique structure.
Isolectra :therian:
@Remittancegirl @cstross Reminds this one of the waterfall model in software engineering - it was originally given in a paper as kind of 'anti-model', and then still unfortunately encounter people trying to make software by applying the 'waterfall model'.
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