One other thing that came out of the panel on structure last weekend was a big hate for the Hero’s Journey format. I feel like I need to speak up to defend it because it’s made a huge difference in my writing. It was what taught me how to plot.

I’ve always been good at coming up with characters and situations that would lend themselves to stories. I sometimes even came up with the inciting incidents, the things that lurched the characters into the situations that would make for stories. I wrote a lot of first chapters of novels, but I couldn’t seem to get past that point. After I’d launched the story, I wasn’t sure what would happen next, what the story would actually be about.

Somehow, I managed to write and sell some books in spite of this. They were category romances, which have their own fairly rigid structure. I knew the beats I needed to hit, and I managed to write stories that hit them well enough to have them published, but I still didn’t know how to plot a book. I was trying to learn. I read a lot of how-to-write books about plotting. I tried making outlines. But it just didn’t click for me. It became more dire when the category line I was writing for folded and my editor suggested I expand the book I was working on into a single-title book, which would require me to double the length and actually have a plot.

Fortunately, around that time, someone spoke to my writing group about the Hero’s Journey, using the book written about it for writers, The Writer’s Journey, and the lightbulb went off. Everything clicked into place. The heavens opened and the angels sang. I finally understood how to plot a book.

The thing is, this structure isn’t drastically different from any other in Western storytelling (non-European-based cultures have their own story structures). They’re all just different language for describing the same thing, and this was a language that spoke to me. It really boils down to a character in a comfort zone (but not living up to their full potential), getting called to leave their comfort zone, learning things along the way, being tested on this and not fully succeeding because there’s something they’re not ready to let go of, then regrouping and trying again, and passing the final test because they can finally let go and undergo a symbolic death and resurrection.

I think a lot of the criticism comes because Hollywood glommed onto this so hard following the success of Star Wars, since George Lucas cited the influence of Joseph Campbell and his Hero with a Thousand Faces. That made this a very rigid structure that film studios follow slavishly, which can result in cookie-cutter movies. One of my issues with all those Marvel movies was that with most of them, I could predict each major event based on the Hero’s Journey by watching the clock. But if you’re looser with following the structure and don’t take it so literally, I think it’s a more useful tool. Another criticism I’ve heard is that it’s male-oriented and about separating from society, and that is what Campbell’s analysis is about, but the first book I applied it to was a small-town romance about fitting in to a community, so it doesn’t have to be about solo journeys and separations. If you look at the Jungian work that Campbell based his analysis on (yes, I’m a nerd), all the journey stuff is metaphorical, anyway, and is a representation of an interior journey. You can use the Hero’s Journey for plotting a story about someone who never goes anywhere, whose journey is strictly internal.

These days, I think I’ve internalized enough about plotting that I may not consciously use this structure to plot, and it is only one of the tools I use. It’s a good way to test a story idea to find if you’ve got enough material for a story in that idea. I use it for the big-picture plotting before I dig deeper, and I layer it with other things. Once I had that plotting epiphany because of the Hero’s Journey, all the other plot stuff I’d read made a lot more sense to me.

So, use it or don’t use it. Just find what speaks to you, what makes sense for your brain, but don’t be rigid about following anything. Unless you’re working in Hollywood, where they have their own issues, you can do whatever works for your story. If people notice your structure, you’re probably doing it wrong. The structure should exist to provide a framework for the story, with the focus on the story.