Is it possible to avoid TheHerosJourney?

Is it possible to write a goo story while avoiding the The Hero's Journey?... and yet still tell a good story?.

I know thousands of stories fit this pattern but as an author it feels shallow to know that your story is just the same story that has always been told time and time again but with just a different cover...

What do you think?.

Personally I would like to make an epic story without following it but... is it possible?. Is this (The Hero's Journey) truly the only path of a hero?.

Are all writers that write heroes eventually destined to write this story ( The Hero's Journey)?

edited 5th Nov '12 11:27:55 PM by FallenLegend

Yes, as long as your definition of what The Hero's Journey is is sufficiently narrow.

edited 6th Nov '12 12:36:14 AM by nrjxll

Yes.

Things like The Hero's Journey are summarized descriptions based off of an analysis of many different works.

They aren't plans for how to make your story. It's a map for how other people have made stories. It's meant to be a description, not a guideline.

edited 6th Nov '12 1:34:27 AM by Kotep

Exactly. While the Hero's Journey is an archetypal storytelling structure, it is far from the only one, and trying to fit every story into it—like trying to force all long-form narratives into a three- or even five-act structure—is the very road to madness, as a literary analyst and a reader. And depending upon the type of story you're telling, it's quite easy to tell a story that doesn't really fit into the structure, or bucks it entirely.

Keep in mind that Fallen Legend specifically mentioned writing 'an epic story with a hero'.

Can you write a story without a predefined pattern? Of course.

Can you write a story without character development? A trickier proposition, but many stories (large scale ones in particular) actually have static characters to draw focus to the events and scope of the stories rather their characters.

Can you write a story without a single hero? Difficult, but it can be done. Faction-scale stories and political dramas tend to bore me, but they can be done. Filtering the plot through an audience surrogate is often done because it makes things easier to follow.

That said, I don't think actively avoiding a pattern (any pattern) is a good idea. Your story should be organic, and if it happens to conform to one structure or another, then who cares. A five-act play is not inherently better than a three-act play, and stories that adhere to the heroes journey are no better or worse than those that don't.

edited 6th Nov '12 4:41:28 AM by CleverPun

I agree, I think it's possible but probably pointless. How you avert the trope depends on how you interpret it. At its loosest, it's when a character goes outside their comfort zone and gets something useful. If you want to keep the epic adventure aspect then going outside a comfort zone is sort of necessary, but you could have a story where the character fails to master the unfamiliar and ultimately gains nothing. Unsatisfying for some, but I think it counts and could still be perfectly entertaining.

One of my WIP is a "quest" set in a fantasy world but the reason for the quest itself is rather mundane - deliver a brooch (that has little monetary value but is a family heirloom) to the heir of a recently deceased person - which serves solely as a device to get the protagonist on the road where he meets other people and has diverse adventures.

I'm planning to avoid much of the standard Hero's Journey so the story's going to be more of an explore of the world (for both the reader and the protagonists).

No World in Peril type thing and, for the most part, the world he's travelling - for all it has shape-shifters, trolls, orcs and other fantastic "races" - is something he's fairly familiar with (having travelled previously) so he's not exactly venturing from the mundane (he's a 200-year-old shapeshifter who's fought off invaders aplenty in his time and is familiar enough with trolls to identify where they came from and know which of the trollish languages they speak, so "mundane" is probably an inaccurate description of his life) into some alien world.

This means my challenge is going to be making the dangers he does encounter interesting/exciting/real to him and also have them escalate gradually to make it tougher as the story goes along - but also not appear too contrived.

I've already decided against having one Big Bad who sends out his minions in order of difficulty (most of my villains tend to be smart enough that if the job can't be handled by a couple of their lowest mooks, they'd immediately throw their toughest/best at the problem without risking/losing all those in the middle.

I've certainly got no plans for the Death/Rebirth, Transformation (except that, being a shapeshifter, he may "transform" a few times :D) and Atonement aspects of the epic - unless events/reactions take that turn as the story evolves.

But I think that with interesting enough adventures and set-backs, getting from A to B in a world where magic works and fantastic races dwell, and the logistics of trying to track down one particular individual in a rather large area, should provide a dangerous and interesting tale that does not fit the Hero's Journey mold.

Sure, there's the Call to Adventure - him being given the task of delivering a piece of jewellery to someone, address unknown - and he he answers it (refusal is not an option for him) and one could argue that the events leading to him getting the brooch classifies as the Threshold Guardians - there will always be aspects that cannot be avoided but a story, once started, does not have to wander down established pathways or tick "boxes".

edited 6th Nov '12 3:41:45 PM by Wolf1066

As with so many of these types of things, the "Hero's Journey" isn't a set of rules that we impose upon stories, it's an observation of how stories tend to behave. If you were to ask Joseph Campbell, who codified it, he'd probably say any story that contained a central protagonist who had to go somewhere and do or get something would qualify as the "Hero's Journey;" he was the first to say that not every aspect he identified needed to be included in a story for it to qualify. If you're writing a linear narrative, it may end up being a Hero's Journey whether you intend it to or not. I don't say that writing a linear narrative that isn't a Hero's Journey is impossible, just that I have yet to see one.

Personally, I'd rather play with it then try and avoid it.

In which case, mine would qualify as a Hero's Journey, even lacking many of the elements shown on the trope page. After all, he's the "hero" of the story and he's going on a journey.

I fully intend to play with a lot of fantasy tropes along the way, though.

A relevant-ish article.

I disliked that article quite a bit, but I agree with its main point about slavish adherence to the Literal Hero's Journey.

To answer the opening post, I would say that it is impossible to avoid the Hero's Journey because it is such a vague framework that anyone can fit a story into it if they try hard enough. Don't worry about your story falling into it, but don't use it as a how to guide when writing your story.