Character Arc: The Hero's Journey

There are a few things you can do before you start writing your novel to assure that it comes out whole and satisfying. Perhaps the most important is to visualize your hero's or heroine's character arc over the breadth of the story.

There are two major arcs occurring simultaneously in a novel that interact to make the story unique and compelling. (There are other, minor, arcs as well, but they are for another discussion, another time.) One major arc is the external story arc . . . all those things that happen around and to the characters that drive their responses and behaviors (through the fulcrum of their personalities). The other is what happens to your hero's or heroine's character itself as it is affected, reacts to, and is transformed by events, realizations, and behaviors. Any novel where the protagonist is the same at the end as she was at the beginning is going to be a boring novel, and that's not what we're all about.

The Hero's Journey, explained in The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, offers an excellent template for planning your protagonist's arc. It is a standard in the arsenal of writing teachers. Campbell's focus was myth, and how all great dramas utilize essential mythical structure. An excellent example is the sweeping and powerful structure of The Odyssey. What a journey Odysseus had!

Once Campbell had published The Hero with a Thousand Faces, "his multi-step outline swept through the screen-writing and fiction-writing community." (Elizabeth Lyon, A Writer's Guide to Fiction, pp. 51-52).

As explained by Lyon in  A Writer's Guide to Fiction, the hero's journey includes three major stages that the protagonist goes through.

• Departure, Separation
• Descent, Initiation, Penetration
• Return

Lyon goes on to show how Campbell further described these stages:

ACT ONE: Departure, Separation

• The Ordinary World/Hero at Home
• Call to Adventure/The Challenge
• Refusal of the Call/Elimination of The Expendable Person
• Meeting the Mentor
• Crossing the First Threshold into the Special World

ACT TWO: Descent, Initiation, Penetration

• Road of Tests and Trilas/Allies and Enemies
• Approach to the Inmost Cave
• Belly of the Whale/Meeting with the Goddess, Temptress; Atonement
• Ordeal/Life an Death Struggle
• Reward

ACT THREE: Return

• Refusal of the Return
• The Ultimate Test/Resurrection
• Return with the Elixir/Master of Two Worlds

In a novel, Act I is approximately the first quarter of the book; Act II is the second and third quarters, and Act III is the last quarter. The same sort of timing and rhythm applies to movies.The movie, JAWS, is  often given as an example to show these stages as we follow Police Chief Martin Brody through his hair-raising journey to defeat the monster shark and save his town and himself (the external monster forces him to face his internal demons and transform). Lyon's book provides an in-depth discussion of each step, or you can find examples and detailed descriptions other than JAWS by Googling Joseph Campbell and The Hero's Journey.

When I'm starting a new novel, I like to think about my protagonist's journey and jot notes to myself before I begin writing, and then start writing, without too much more pre-planning. When I've written enough to feel grounded in the story, though, it's time to look at whether I've planned for all these elements of the hero's journey to enter my protagonist's arc. If I haven't, early in the writing is the time to do it.

What's your process? Do you consciously incorporate the elements of the Hero's Journey in your novel structure? If not, do you find that they're all there when you've finished?