Some definitions: The Oxford dictionary [link here] lists four meanings for the noun „act“. These are: „A thing done; a deed“; „A pretence“; „A written law passed by Parliament, Congress, etc.“; and „A main division of a play, ballet, or opera“. You know the last definition — in the context below, the first one is more interesting. It refers to an action.

Preamble: I’ve spent the decade more or less constantly researching the Hero’s Journey, an idea that was first introduced by the mythologist, writer, and lecturer Joseph Campbell in 1949. When I first hear of it, I treated it simply as a pattern, and I enjoyed finding it in the books I read and the movies I watched. Back then, it was little more than a rough template that I never used, because I felt that „applying“ the Hero’s Journey to a story could only end in disaster(*). Then I read Chris Vogler’s interpretation of Campbell’s structure and started to understand the psychological dimension of the journey Campbell described. Vogler helped me to get rid of Campbell’s rigid terminology and develop an interpretation of the Hero’s Journey that suited the type of story I write. These stories usually focus on the psychological development of the characters and rarely know a physical antagonist. While I have a vague idea what plot and turning and other points in a story are, they never helped me as Vogler’s Journey did. Below, I sketch the concept with respect to my character-driven stories.

So: What is a story? I’ve mulled over this question quite a bit and the best definition I could come up with is this: A story is change. An apple that sits on a table is not a story. An apple that falls from a table and is carried away by a tribe of ants that decide to worship it as their new deity is.

How does change work? How can we describe it in a way that others will understand?

First of all, we need to set a benchmark. Change is relative. We need to anchor our narrative somewhere. The statement „Ellen drank her last bottle of beer two weeks ago“ is not meaningful. We don’t know who Ellen is, or what not drinking a bottle of beer for two weeks means to her. Is she a girl of 15 years that had only recently drunk her first bottle of beer? Is she a mother of two that is so busy she can’t find the time to relax and have a beer with it? Is she an alcoholic who decided to stop drinking? Only if we provide this type of information, our audience is able to understand the impact of the change we describe.

Next, we have to state what the change is. In the example above, it is that Ellen hadn’t been drinking for some time. Again, whether this is big news or can be shrugged off as irrelevant depends on Elen herself and her situation before she stopped drinking.

And that, you might argue, is it.

But it isn’t. Imagine Ellen truly was an alcoholic. Would you be happy with the statement that she didn’t drink for two weeks? Probably not. You would want to know whether she „really made it“. Did she manage to stop drinking for sure? Or did she relapse? I would imagine that most people would be happy about the first ending, and sad (or angry, or disappointed) about the second. Why? Because it meant that the change you presented before really wasn’t a change. You told your audience about a brave effort, but in the end, Ellen failed. She still drinks and continues to wreck her life.

An interesting observation at this point is that the last part of the story and the first part serve a similar purpose. Both the „anchor“ and the „consolidation“ part help the audience to decide: Is what happened really important? Is it real? I believe this is one of the reasons why the Hero’s Journey so often is referred to as a circular journey: You start somewhere, go somewhere, and then you come back to the beginning and compare what you have achieved with how things were before.

Ellen’s story is a very clean, very simple Hero’s Journey. In more abstract terms, the three acts of the Hero’s Journey could look like this(**):

Act I: Status Quo. What’s the anchor of your story? Why is it important, or, equivalently, why should your audience care about it? What happens if the change that you talk about does not happen?
Act II: The Change.
Act III: Consolidation. Is the change for real? Or will the hero relapse and everything will turn back to how it was?

Lastly, in terms of storytelling, I understand an act to be nothing more than a structural element of a story, like chapters and scenes. Per se, it doesn’t mean something.

Footnotes:

(*) I still think that. What the Hero’s Journey really does for me these days is to help me organize the stories I already have in mind. I never use it to create a story.

(**) However, don’t get hung up on words. I did that in the beginning, and it did not help, at all. For me, the Hero’s Journey really only unleashed it’s power when I stopped thinking about „The Road of Trials“, and the „Magic Forest“, and so on. The only term that I still use because it appeals to me is „The Shadow“.

---

(0)

Login to post a comment!