: Re: Can the Hero's Journey be detrimental to the process of storywriting? When it comes to common writing advice, the Hero's Journey and Show, don't Tell, are the most common ones. The second one

@Gretchen741

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They need to start out vulnerable. They need to have some sort of humongous flaw that makes them stop in they’re tracks when mentioned. For example, my MC struggles with enormous amounts of guilt. Whenever the antagonist reminds her of what she did, and how she is a horrible person (she isn’t) my MC freezes and gets stuck in horribly vivid flash backs of her family’s death, and how she thinks it’s her fault.
Later in the story, the protagonist/MC must learn to deal with their flaw and weakness. The flaw your character has can be many many things, but it often involves their backstory. Sometimes not, however. In the Percy Jackson And The Olympians series, Percy’s weakness is that he is to loyal to his friends, he would chose saving them over saving the world. That makes for a very interesting flaw, as most of the time flaws are BAD things. Not good things. This is another approach to choosing your MC’s weakness.
During the story, the heroes flaw must be provoked many times. It also is a good idea to make your antagonist and protagonist have a similar flaw. In my story, the antagonist kills out of revenge for the loved ones she lost. While my MC still is struggling with coming to terms for her loved ones. My MC can easily see how she could have been the antagonist.
Another fun way to go about this is making your protagonist and antagonist opposites. Another example from Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Percy is to loyal to his friends, and Lord Kronos doesn’t care at all about his allies.
Your character needs to go from being vulnerable, to being invincible (personality wise)
The second thing you want to tackle in a hero’s journey is their friends, love interests, mentors, enemies, frenemies, allies, family members, and any other side characters you can think of. Without interacting with other characters, your MC will never change. They don’t have a reason to.
They may change to save their friends. They may change to land a date. They may change because their friends helped them through it. Many many options.
I hope this helps you!

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