Starting with the stuff you guys sent me to critique, I realized that apparently the Hero’s Journey has gone feral out there.
Now, if you read Campbell’s book, you’ll find the entire Hero’s Journey thing is way more flexible than it seems at first sight. No, seriously. No one tells you that the events can happen in any order, etc. Or few people do.
Now we know how it works in stories, and a certain order is usually followed. But the guy who codified the list was more loosey goosey, so that you read it and you get all confused and feel as though you don’t have a place to stand.
But in general, the Hero’s journey is a certain series of beats in order, and a good way to organize your story if you’re feeling insecure or confused, or the story keeps trying to escape you.
More importantly, though, it gives us a vocabulary to talk to each other about what’s wrong with a story. Like “Dang it, I’m trying to get this story going, but I’m on chapter ten and the idiot character keeps refusing the call.”
Or “I think you need to give this guy a mentor/guide, just so he has someone to talk to. And to clue your reader to the path ahead. Keep in mind, it can be someone in his memory, or in a dream.” Etc. And the other writer knows exactly what you mean.
I think it is that ability to allow writers to discuss what is going on in a story, which can otherwise be really difficult to pin down.
However, y’all, it’s gone feral out there. And you guys are treating it like some kind of ritual you have to follow by the numbers.
Further, perhaps because the blind tend to lead the blind in these things, you’re treating it like every step is the same and has to be given major importance.
So…. about the normal world.
Yes, the story is supposed to start in the normal world.
And depending on what you’re writing, the character’s normal world might give a perfectly adequate introduction.
For illustrations — because I don’t have time to copy them here, go read the beginning of Friday by Robert A. Heinlein. Or for that matter, Heinlein’s Puppet Masters. Or try one of Pratchett’s. While the books start in the characters’ normal world, it gives you a clue of what’s coming.
The books clue you in to genre, the character’s personality, and the general tone of the story.
The problem I kept finding both in your submissions and… other stuff is that you guys start in a normal world that has nothing to do with the genre or the adventure to come.
Now I understand in normal situations, the book is bought on description; it is in a section, and it has a cover. Yeah. Except in indie all those might fall through, or worse it is possible that you’ll find this book you downloaded on your kindle, and start to read it without any clue what it is, anymore.
And you don’t want your readers to think they’re reading a humorous mystery, or worse, an amusing clean romance, just before the character takes off on a cross-time adventure, or is kidnapped by an alien cabal, or–
So…. about that “normal time” for the characters.
Sure, I know, it’s supposed to be there. But you know, it can be there very briefly.
Sure, in Pride and Prejudice Mr. and Mrs. Bennet talk about the new neighbor at breakfast, and there’s time, and…. But it was a different time, and at any rate, it’s a romance, so the conversation at breakfast cues it.
Your first three pages are:
First, not supposed to bore your reader out of his/her mind. So the real world…. If the real world of our character is boringly mundane, please don’t put it in. No, seriously.
Second, signal what genre and pacing and voice we are to expect. Don’t have your character flirt with the diner waitress, unless in the next paragraph she’s revealed as the space queen who’s there to kidnap him. No seriously. You can have him make a flirtatious quip, but then the action should be on.
In fact:
Keep the “normal world” to about half a page, tops. And even in that part, he should be noticing signs of what’s to come. “Wait, why is everyone in the diner carrying a water pistol. Wait. Those look funny. More like … beam weapons or something.”
The “normal world” is not a sacred rule. Heck, you can start with your character discovering a body and/or falling down a space/time vortex, and then give us the normal world in his thoughts. “Wait a minute. I was sitting in my favorite diner, and about to order a coffee… And then Maisie pulled a beam weapon on me, and told me “eat space time earthworm,” and then.” And that’s enough.
All putting in the “normal world” means is that we know what your character came from, and the order he wants restored. It doesn’t mean that you have to take up two or three pages of it, if the break with it is so complete that the novel has a completely different character after that point. (Or the short, which makes it all more compressed and faster.)
Go read the beginning of several novels. I mean, ones that work and that you’ve read before. And write down the clues they give you as to
And next time the cult of the “normal times” tells you that you don’t have it, tell them that Campbell says stages of the journey can be abbreviated. Or given out of order. Your normal time just comes here and there, in recollections and dialogue, later on. Right now, you’re opening with the exciting space time vortex.
And if they won’t leave you alone? Come and tell them to talk to me. That OUGHT to be amusing.
Mad Genius Club 
18 responses to “The Normal world”
Remember the Normal World of Pride and Prejudice cues the nature of the couple talking, which is going to be vital for the plot ahead.
The best thing to include in your Normal World is a reason why it’s wrong for your hero.
I take that back. The best thing to include in your Normal World is something to make the readers want to follow the hero.
When the Normal World is wrong for the hero, it’s generally easy to make that the thing.
I’ve grumbled before about the excruciatingly slow start to Cooper’s The Spy, but despite it being eighty pages of dinner with the blockheads, but story is happening during those days.
Even though on the surface, it is ‘day in the life’ stuff, Important things are going on and cueing up for when events begin to move. It’s just not obvious at the time, because it is a spy novel. Most of the characters are hiding what they are. It takes a while before the discrepancies start to accumulate.
I suspect that is a fundamental challenge to the spy genre: how to plant the hook early, without also tipping the reader off to the secret? But that’s just a guess. Still need to get through that door stopper, and into more recent entrants to the genre.
Yeah, reading the Campbell book, I was struck by how each “step” in the Journey is really a umbrella he’s holding over a cluster of vaguely similar events outlined by religion, myth and folklore, without much regard for the ways in which those events meant different things to different cultures. If you abstract from his pomposity and the structural emphasis a lot of Hero’s Journey users resort to (Story Circle, etc), you’re left with a list of things that *tend* to happen in stories and *tend* to mean something in stories, with an empirically tested framework for what they mean and how they relate to each other.
If you are familiar with the stories he cites, it’s clear he’s cherry-picking.
yep
Yes, that’s probably most obvious in his use of Bible stories, but I seem to recall raising my eyebrows over his take on the story of Osiris and some of the Greek or Norse stuff as well.
but my MC’s ‘normal world’ is flying a ducted fan vehicle for a secret government agency…
I’m struggling with this in the time-travel WIP- it’s a slow-burn romance with side quests into redemption and psychological studies, but it opens with a quadruple homicide. Hello, mood whiplash!
LOL. Is there some way to start it just before that?
I’ve been poking at a few possibilities; I’m trying not to fall into the opposite trap of a first scene that too slow or obscure to catch the reader’s interest.
Three sentences, and you know that 1) this is science fiction; 2) this is an “action” novel; and 3) the protagonist is very much a badass.
You don’t know the character’s name, you don’t even know their gender, you know nothing else about the rest of the book – but it’s already hit three major things that many people are looking for in their next read.
So long as you don’t screw up and hold to the promises you’ve made at the start, you’ll have a successful book. (Other promises apply to other genres, of course.)
PRECISELY. It grabs.
I just remembered the other thing about the Hero’s Journey: it only works for characters who’s core weakness is an inability to act. Characters with different core flaws have differ growth paths.
Athena, for example. Can you picture her *ever* ‘refusing the call?’ Her issue was learning when it was appropriate to hit things with a big hammer, not getting moving in the first place.
Refusal of the call is not required. Also, a scene where she hits something with a big hammer can be the refusal
she did in a way, but it was internal. I.e. the call to give a d*mn about other people.
It’s super-flexible.
I think the opening pages of Tam Lin by Pamela Dean are a perfect example of starting out in the Normal World while still giving you an indication of what the novel is going to be like. I mean, it starts out by telling you about the college’s residential office removing bookshelves, of all things. You’d think that would be boring and unnecessary. Yet in that first paragraph, you get a sense of the college being out of touch, of the horrible state of those bookshelves, of the student contrivances to deal with said bookshelves, and the fact that Classics majors are crazy, which is very plot-pertinent.
Moreover, the rest of the book seems to be a normal (if 1970s) college experience, interesting and a lot of fun, but not overly relevant to the title… until near the end. And then when you reread the book, you find out that the weirdness has been there all along, with the Fae influences entirely cloaked by the weirdness that is college.
(That is, by the way, a book I thought was okay until I went to college, upon which I found out I enjoyed it a lot more with my own college weird experience to back it up. I definitely have it as a favorite now.)
A screenwriting book that I read decades ago used The Karate Kid (the original 80s one, not the produced in China remake) as a template for The Hero’s Journey, with showing how it set out the standard beats along the way, along with how it turned some of them just a little to be fresh.