THE HERO’S JOURNEY
by Wendy J. Dunn
The Hero's or Heroine's Journey – a challenging task for any writer! How do you plot subtle changes to your characters? How do they develop through the story? Are you plotting each stage of their lives, or go with your characters’ flow?
Author Wendy J. Dunn outlines her heroine Kate's journey below.
"I was trying to be faithful to the shape of the historical record and the meaning of all these events that historians had written about. What I was writing was not real but it was as true as I could make it." (Greville cited by Lynch 2009).
“Writing engages me in my own personal hero’s journey,” I wrote in my PhD journal. Reading that back years ago propelled me to deepen my knowledge about what the hero’s journey means for writers and writing. I added to my home library Murdock’s The Heroine's Journey (1990), Campbell’s The Hero with a thousand faces (2008), Volger’s classic’s work The Writer’s Journey (2007). Reading them, to my surprise, I discovered many of the steps of the hero’s journey connected to my own writing process – indeed, to my core beliefs about life itself. From childhood, I have viewed life as a journey – a journey to learn from – to grow from. Committing to a writer’s life is also a commitment to a journey to learn from and grow from.
Embarking on a creative PhD formed part of this 'learning' journey. My artefact for my PhD was The Light in the Labyrinth, a work targeting young adults. But I also wrote it with the hope that it could be a crossover novel – a novel that would be read by both young adults and adults – which has proven the case. The hero’s journey has strong connections to the young adult genre with its usual quest for identity (Nilsen and Donelson 2009). I wondered if I could use the twelve major steps of the hero’s journey to map out and help develop The Light in the Labyrinth. So, I used Vogler’s outline (Vogler 2007) as my model, and set out the hero’s journey of Kate Carey, my main character and imagining of the niece of Anne Boleyn, in my writing journal at the start of my PhD journey. OMG - was it really in November 2010?
As you can see below, each step helped me to not only mapping out the plot of my story but offered inciting events for the development of my story.
1. ORDINARY WORLD:
Introduce reader to Kate and her world.
2. CALL TO ADVENTURE
Kate goes to court.
3. REFUSAL OF THE CALL
Kate discovers and denies her true parentage. She asks, ‘Who am I?’.
4. MEETING THE MENTOR
The older Kate Willoughby mentors the younger Kate. She provides Kate with critical knowledge to help her survive.
5. CROSSING THE THRESHOLD
Kate steps towards accepting that she is the daughter of the King. She becomes aware of the plots to bring Anne Boleyn down.
ACT 2 Anne Boleyn loses her baby.
6. TESTS, ALLIES, ENEMIES
Now more settled into her life at court, Kate faces that there are few she can trust. She fears for her aunt but has no power to help her. But she helps her by her support and love.
7. APPROACHING THE INMOST CAVE
The plots continue. Kate learns even more about those who live their lives at court.
8. THE CRISIS / SUPREME ORDEAL
Her aunt’s arrest and trial. Kate’s loyalty is tested and found true.
9. SEIZING THE REWARD
Kate is no longer a child. She supports her aunt as she waits for her execution.
ACT 3
10. THE ROAD BACK
Anne’s execution. Kate’s mother and grandmother come to bury Anne Boleyn.
11. THE CLIMAX / RESURRECTION
Kate realises blood does not make a family but love. She accepts her stepfather as a father.
12. RETURN WITH THE ELIXIR
Kate returns home a sadder, wiser girl, but now bound forever to her cousin Elizabeth through her love of Anne Boleyn.
Setting out Kate’s hero’s journey like this also helped in other ways. It opened my eyes to the similarity to my story to that of the myth of Persephone.
The heart of The Light in the Labyrinth is its mother and daughter theme. Kate is alike to Persephone – who enters Hades, to her mother’s heartache. The Light in the Labyrinth shines a light on how they find their way back to one another. Thinking about my story also helped me identified how my work connected to aspects of the Le bel inconnu, or the Fair Unknown, the Arthurian styled legend of the noble youth raised without knowledge of his true identity (Stewart 1973, p. 569). By this I mean, my Kate is the Fair Unknown who comes to the court of Henry VIII. Her experiences open the door to self-knowledge, as well as well the discovery that changes her life.
With use of the hero's journey, I constructed Kate’s character by using familiar conflicts found in the young adult genre. Father-less, she yearns for a father’s love and protection, but she resents the man who is now married to her mother. By first rejecting her place in her mother’s new family, not knowing where she belongs or the direction for her life, my young Kate embarks on her own hero(ine) journey through a labyrinth to discover her identity and place in the world.
Remembering how vital that first jotting of the hero’s journey in my journal for the writing of The Light in the Labyrinth makes me wonder why it took me sometime before I mapped out the hero’s journey for my Katherine of Aragon’s novels, The Duty of Daughters and All Manner of Things. While these works are for an adult readership, the use of the hero’s journey – whether deliberate or not – is very common in the construction of a novel. Mapping out Kate's journey in 2010, at the start of writing this work, was vital in keeping me on track for its completion. I found the same with Shades of Yellow, the novel now to be published with Other Terrain Press on September 7th.
Yes – the writing road calls for writers to walk the hero’s journey. The main thing is to keep walking no matter the disappointments.
I will leave you with one of my poems when I mull about the hero's journey of the creator:
A SACRED THING
Centuries ago Porphyrus wrote:
‘A threshold is a sacred thing.’
And I think: the sacredness of the threshold
is the fire of imagination
where a creator is consumed
and surrenders self
to emerge again
reborn.
Each act of creation
is akin to finding courage
to enter Hades
and to find your way
home again
resurrected, alive
bearing the light of
the lantern-bearer. *
Works Cited:
Campbell, J 2008, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, New World Library, California.
Lynch, G.L.2009, Apocryphal stories in Kate Grenville's Searching for the Secret River.
Murdock, M 1990, The Heroine's Journey, Shambhala, Boston, New York.
Nilsen, AP & Donelson, KL 2009, Literature for Today's Young Adults, Pearson, Boston.
Stewart, M 1973, The Hollow Hills, Morrow, New York.
Vogler, C. 2007 The writer's Journey: Mythic structure for writers
*First published in The Blue Nib, August 2020.
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