I’m writing my third book live on the Internet, and you can follow along! Today: more plotting.
If you missed the previous parts of this story, you can start here. The second part is here.
The Hero’s Journey
The Hero’s Journey is a way of structuring stories in a way that is similar to how myths, fairy tales, and religious stories are structured.
In contrast to other story structure formulas, the Hero’s Journey focuses less on the action and more on the development of the protagonist’s character and his relations to the people around him. If you find this post interesting, you should make sure to read Vogler’s book, where he explains the concept in a lot more detail.
Here’s the main idea. The story of a book is always the story of its hero. What we want, when we pick up a book, is to follow the hero on his journey, share his fears and his suffering, and finally return victorious to the world. Many examples from books and movies show that these hero-journeys all tend to have some elements in common. They share a common structure, as well as particular types of characters that the hero meets on his way. By using this well-known, but unconsciously perceived structure, we can make our book resonate with the readers. We can also avoid simple structural mistakes, like having a plot that is too thin, or that lacks meaningful personal development of the hero.
Here’s how it works (from Vogler’s book):
- The hero is first shown in his ordinary world.
- He or she receives the call to adventure.
- Hero is reluctant and refuses the call.
- A mentor appears and encourages the hero.
- The hero crosses the first threshold and enters the special world of the story.
- Hero encounters tests, allies and enemies.
- Hero approaches the inmost cave, crossing a second threshold.
- Hero endures the ordeal. This is often the main fight.
- Hero takes possession of the reward and…
- …is pursued on the road back to the ordinary world.
- Hero crosses the third threshold, experiences a resurrection, and is transformed.
- Hero returns with the elixir (treasure) to benefit the ordinary world.
(Slightly rephrased from Vogler, Writer’s Journey, p.19)
If you’d like to see how this works in all kinds of stories, head over to Vogler’s book, or just Google Hero’s Journey. There’s a ton of information out there discussing this structure. A prominent example for this structure is the first Star Wars movie.
Applying the structure
For us, a few of these steps won’t be necessary or even desirable:
- The ordinary world (1) doesn’t need to be shown, since the book is the third in a series. The reader knows the heroines well enough by now. So we can save some time here.
- We’ll need a call to adventure (2). Just arriving at the mission house is not enough. They need a reason to engage with the local tribes and share their cause.
- We also don’t need the reluctance step (3). This is useful psychologically in a grown-up book, but would be confusing in a children’s book, especially in a series. The readers know that the whole point of the kids going anywhere is to get into trouble there, so there’s no need for them to pretend to be reluctant.
- On the other hand, we will need the mentor (4). The children are in a foreign, dangerous world, and they will need a guide. The Yanomami boy and his father are the “mentors” who will guide the girls through the world of the tribe.
- Following them, they will leave the mission and cross into the special world of the story (5). The moment they leave the mission grounds, they are in the world of the tribe. They have accepted the call, and have now taken sides.
- Tests, allies and enemies (6). Here’s an opportunity to complicate matters a bit. Let’s say, not all Yanomami are opposed to the logging. Some get a little money from the loggers for the wood of the trees that grow on the tribe’s land. They are in favour of selling their land and moving away to a government settlement somewhere far away. They are the enemies. Others refuse to leave their land, like the boy’s father and the chief of the village. They are the allies. Something must happen at this point to draw the lines clearly. Perhaps the loggers come with their final offer and threaten the tribe to accept it, or else. The tribe gathers and they discuss. The girls offer their opinion. They tell them of people living in bad conditions in these government settlements (how do they know? — They have a book about the Amazon tribes, which they got from the mission?). The tribe breaks apart, and the lines are drawn. The logger-friendly faction leaves the common home and goes with the loggers, to accept their money. One nasty man, in particular, is their leader. In the end we will have to heal that schism. They will have to return and be accepted back into the community.
- The inmost cave (7). Rose and Mary spend the night in the Shabono, watching the lives of the tribe. It is right after some of them left the community. In the night, somebody attacks the Shabono, and tries to burn it down. They all escape, but the Shabono burns down. Now Rose and Mary have been threatened personally. This is the inmost cave. There is no going back now.
- Rose and Mary persuade Mary’s father to take in all the children from the destroyed Shabono and to let them stay in the mission. In the meantime, the others discuss what to do. Build a new house? If they do, that too might be attacked. As long as the loggers want their land, they will never be safe. And next time, perhaps someone will die. Perhaps all of them.
- The ordeal (8). There’s only one way out. To fight. Scooter, Rose and Mary explain that what the loggers want is money only. Scooter has the central idea: if they make it expensive enough for the loggers to keep going, then the whole thing will become unprofitable. And then they’ll leave and go somewhere else.
- Good idea, say the Y. We don’t want to kill anyone, but making it expensive for them is something they deserve. After all, they destroyed our home.
- How to make it expensive? Steal their stuff, destroy their machines. — How to destroy a truck? Scooter: I’ll look on the Internet. We have a computer at the mission house.
- Rose’s idea: we’ll take the Y kids and go play around the camp of the loggers. We’ll pretend that we collect leaves for medicine or something, and take big sacks with us. They won’t harm a few playing children, particularly if we’re with them. (…)
- They do it. The next day, Rose and Mary take the Y kids from the mission and they play around the loggers’ camp. Whenever they see a tool, into one of the sacks it goes, together with the leaves. Slowly but systematically, they steal as many tools, keys and other equipment they can carry. They know that the trucks and logging machines stand unguarded overnight, but (yet) they don’t know how to destroy them. They are big.
- They go back to the mission and put the stuff into boxes, which they send back to the capital, to the company’s headquarters that owns the logging business. It will take weeks for the things to arrive there and come back again.
- Rose and Mary talk to the boy: could he go and alert the other tribes?
- Scooter: I found a way to destroy their trucks. But we’ll need fuel. Rose: There’s is car gasoline in those drums out back, behind the main house. (They need it because there’s no fuel station in the rainforest!)
- In the night, they go out and take some into bottles. Scooter and Rose go and empty the fuel into the diesel tanks of the big trucks. The tanks have no locks, since they are not needed in the jungle. No: the kids just provide the idea and the fuel. The sabotage is performed by the tribe (so that Rose and Mary don’t actually do anything criminal, except to relay information from the Internet).
- The next day, they watch the loggers. One by one, the big trucks fail, and the tools to repair them seem to have disappeared!
- The loggers are helpless. At this moment, the loggers’ camp is surrounded by not only our tribe, but an alliance of the five or six surrounding tribes, which the boy has called for help.
- In that last moment before their defeat, the loggers try to grab their weapons. But the exiled tribesmen, who are still living among them, wrestle the weapons away from them.
- The loggers have to leave and abandon all their machines. They are escorted out of the forest, and put onto a boat at the mission river pier (since their trucks are dead). Rose and Mary tell them that they better not return to the logging company, because they will be held responsible for the destroyed machines, and might have to pay for them. Better disappear to some other place. They nod, defeated (11).
- The tribes re-unite. They take in those who left. “We didn’t know they were so bad,” they say. “When we saw that they were ready to shoot you, we had to stop them. Now we will help you rebuild the Shabono.”
- Mary’s father provides help and tools. They also have the tools of the loggers, which have not yet been shipped away, and are still in the boxes. They take them out and use them to build a new Shabono.
- That evening, surrounded by the first columns of what will become the new Shabono, they all celebrate a big party (12), with food, drink and music (research what they’d have!) Everybody is happy. The end.
So that’s it. I wrote this outline from the ideas in the previous post in about two hours of work, while waiting for my kids to finish their swimming lesson.
Stay tuned to see how we’ll improve this outline in the next instalment! You can find all the posts of this series on my blog or on Medium.
Thanks for reading!