WRITE YOUR NOVEL: Tips from a NYT Bestseller

Lesson 6: The Hero's Journey

Lesson Six: The Hero's Journey

All right, true confession time. When I was in college and found Joseph Campbell through his book (and Bill Moyers' amazing documentary), The Power of Myth, I fell in love.

Who cared that he was a happily married guy more than three times my age? This guy got it!

He understood everything I'd been trying to say with my writing since I was four years old. He gave me hope that I wasn't alone, that there were others out there just like me, unable to put two words together in conversation but building entire universes in our minds.

When I first read Joseph Campbell I felt like I was coming home.

Without his inspiration, I never would have joined my first writers' group, never begun to submit my work or take it seriously, never have taken the next step in my writing.

The Power of Myth and even more so, once I got my hands on it, the Hero of a Thousand Faces, instilled in me the essence of all great writing:

It's all about the character.

Sounds simple, right? We already knew that—so why do so many of us get side-tracked by convoluted plot points and action sequences?

Campbell would say it's because we aren't allowing our heroes to take their own journey. That it is necessary for them to suffer and even "die" before they can achieve their ultimate goal and reward. That we need to send our heroes to hell and back before they're worthy of their happily ever after. And that often the goals they achieve in the end aren't the ones they thought were so vital and essential when they began.

I was amazed to find that after reading Campbell and going back to analyze my own work, that I already instinctively followed his hero's journey.

I think I absorbed it through a youth filled with reading—I would devour any book that fell into my hands!

If you want to tell stories, the best advice I can give you is to enjoy them yourself. Read, read, read—novels, short stories, screenplays, biographies, non-fiction, everything!