Hero’s journey

In the last part, we talked about it seeming to be difficult to tell origin stories that inweave new concepts. Apparently, there’s something like laws of nature that apply to writing. Let’s have a look at the hero’s journey. Most of you should be familiar with this. In its beginning, the hero (or heroine) lives in their own world until something happens with an impact that changes the hero’s worldview and sets everything into motion—something that makes the hero and their mentor go on that journey.

At first, protection and guidance from the mentor are needed by the hero because otherwise, the bad in the world had a too easy job with the hero, but ultimately, the mentor’s destiny is to die and therefore leave the hero on their own. At that point, the hero’s confidence is low, but now that things are already in motion, there’s no turning back. The next confrontation with the villain will be disastrous, but not shattering. Nonetheless, it will be enough to make the hero doubt themself, but that process is necessary to grow realistically. Eventually, this enables the hero to be victorious over the villain in the next encounter and save the world.

Even though that is classic storytelling, we also find that method in science fiction stories like Star Wars, which has surprisingly many parallels to earth culture and mythology if you take a closer look. But as we already observed, that’s not a principle that only applies to ancient Greek literature anyway.

Plato’s doctrine of forms of literature

Speaking of Greek art and culture, Plato formulated his doctrine of forms like that: There’s a mindscape beyond our reality where all ideas exist as templates, and we could only catch an insufficient glimpse at it because we can’t fully grasp it. Therefore, we would emulate these ideas and approximate them, but never completely acquire something entirely equal to the very idea. Maybe it’s the same with the laws of literature or the stories we want to tell. Of course, there’s the hero’s journey, but to tell it in an enjoyable, entertaining, and refreshing manner is easier said than done.

When you get what you want but not what you need

I found the following conversation on Twitter in German, which translates to this:

Quote

I (to the anesthetist): How old is your son

He: At the surgeon age

I: Meaning?

He: He constantly asks for things he wants to have, inarticulately, and then throws his instruments away in anger because nobody knows what he wants

Who would call themself a “person in need of harmony”? Okay, here and there somebody raised their hand—that’s perfectly fine. When you read a story on Wattpad, chances are that you come across a story written by a beginner. When one writes for the first few times, it can happen, that, when one realized, one can create whole words by just writing, that one attempts to put the perfect imaginable scenario on paper (What if I were president? King? Incredibly rich? Immortal? What if nobody had to feel the pinch of hunger? etc.).

Especially from science fiction, we know that in every hopeless bad (dystopia) there is good; and in every phantasmically good (utopia) there is bad. Eventually, we accomplish the opposite of what we wanted. If we are perfectly happy, we get used to it, and soon perfectly isn’t enough anymore. But what to do if there’s no more happiness to gain from anywhere? Or we begrudge the protagonist their happiness because they got it for free, and it, therefore, feels like happiness is worthless. Long story short: Living in the land of cockainage will turn out to be only half as good as it sounds at most at first thought.

A recurring topic of discussions are the deaths of beloved characters. It’s said that one could only hate what one had loved before. There is a certain truth to this: We mourn the deaths of these fictional people, since authors brought them to life, since they were able to tell character arcs that were so authentic that we became fond of them as if they were real. Even though their death hurts and moves us, it proves one thing: The story is written outstandingly well. We should acknowledge that at that moment.

Fight and battle scenes

In German TV we have an action series called "Alarm for Cobra 11 – The Highway Police" which embodies perfectly what could be summed up as “spectacle”. I don’t particularly like that kind of show, since they primarily focus on mass crashes and explosions, but over 20 seasons seem to prove it right.

That being said, I have to admit, that I’m not good at writing either fight or battle scenes. Especially with these, it shows if you stick with the rules no matter what:

Figure A swipes at figure B with their sword.
Figure B dodges and swipes at figure A with their mace.
Figure A dodges
[…]

Let’s have a look at a fun fact: Did you know that in multiple-choice quizzes, the correct answer is mostly C? Have you already created such a quiz on your own? If that’s the case, how did you manage not to have a recognizable pattern of which answer is the correct one? The next time when you create such a quiz, watch yourself if you now avoid making C the correct answer after what I told you.

Another example is an anecdote from when I was still in school: In geography class, we got the homework to interview seventy people in a neighboring village in our spare time. I wasn’t really a rebel in school, but I couldn’t see the point of doing that. Long story short: I figured, I could just fake these interviews. It turned out to still be a huge amount of work. Besides the paperwork itself, I had to create characters over characters in my mind, and they had to be as diverse as possible. Even though I already wrote stories back then, I never had to create seventy characters for one story only, that stand up to scrutiny. Well, on the other hand, people like George Lucas envision a backstory for every single extra on set.

There is a way to prove if books have been cooked or elections have been tampered with. It’s called Benford's law. It’s interesting that, according to Benford, people, who do these kinds of manipulations, tend to make certain kinds of errors, which leads to the creation of numeral series that look random at first sight but wouldn’t occur normally.

Let’s get back to writing battle scenes. When I write such scenes, of course, I may show duels, but they do not mean much to the whole. Yet, they can be utilized for character building. But the overall battle has another meaning: Let’s assume, we have party A and party B. Party A should eventually win the battle. It would not be very entertaining if party A was superior to party B from the very beginning and throughout the whole battle. It would actually be pretty boring. One thing is clear: Tides have to be turned at least one time. Of course, it has to be believable. As I told you earlier on, fights are not about the slugfest but what you want to tell in context to the surrounding story. Why does party A win? What does that mean for party B?