What I like about math–scratch that; there’s nothing I like about math (when I was in Teacher’s College and learning about learning disabilities, I decided I could diagnosed myself with a learning disability about numbers 🙂 I swear! It’s why my pulse races and my mouth goes dry when I’m asked to look at, think about, concentrate on, manipulate or work with numbers.)
What got me through math class in school were formulas. I had no understanding of what they meant or why we were supposed to use them, but I could plug the numbers into them and work through the equations. (That is, until the senior math classes in high school… then you were actually supposed to know what you were doing. Much, much too unrealistic.)
Turns out what got me through my first novel, the YA murder mystery, was a formula, too. Never thought about it at the time, but since I wanted to write a contemporary version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, all I had to do was follow his plot. Of course I made some brilliant changes, that if the book ever gets published will live on for 400+ years, but still, I owe credit to William himself. (Who, by the way, often “stole” his material from other sources. He may be credited with inventing over 1,700 new words in English (“manager,” “uncomfortable”, “eyeball”), but he often lifted his ideas from others.) To quote Mark Twain,
“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”
See what I did there, eh? Eh? Used someone else’s idea to explain my own thoughts?
Well anyway, that’s what I did, and while that first novel is not yet published, it was successful enough to get picked up by a literary agent, which means someone other than my family liked it, which means my use of a formula worked.
Then I started my Lyra novel. I found I was working without a net. I had no plot to follow. Gosh darn, it was all up to me. But all was not lost. I’ve been teaching story analysis for more than a decade. I know the structure of a story: inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement… When I ran into trouble with plot–the sequence of events–I turned to my trusty plot graph.
Of course, if you read my last post, “Stalled (or Not)?” you know I was (ok, ok, still am) struggling with the ending. The plot. Making the sequence of events all make sense.
I’m getting there–because of a formula.
The Hero’s Journey.
I was teaching it to my students when we were discussing mythology, but this formula of the hero’s journey applies equally to many contemporary stories such as Harry Potter and the Star Wars movies.
Adapted from the work of Joseph Campbell, a scholar and writer of comparative mythology, the Hero’s Journey is a 12-stage formula (open to multitudinous–another Shakespeare-invented word that means “a lot”–of interpretations):
- Ordinary World: The world the protagonist lives in as the story starts
- Call to Adventure: A call to action
- Refusal of the Call: Reluctance on the hero’s part
- Meeting the Mentor: A person who guides the desperate hero
- Crossing the Threshold into the Special World: Beginning the quest by going somewhere different
- Tests, Allies, Enemies: The struggles the hero faces on his or her journey
- Approach: Making the final preparations for the final leap into the unknown (right before the final battle with the bad guy, which could be an inner conflict instead of an actual person)
- Ordeal: The final battle (can be inner conflict, too)
- Reward: Defeating the enemy and coming out with a prize, either literal or spiritual (such as new insight)
- The Road Back: One last push to return to the Ordinary World
- Resurrection: The climax where the hero faces the most dangerous encounter with death and the consequences are far-reaching
- Return with the Elixir: The hero returns home a changed person.
This formula led me to those questions I needed to ask to help me figure out my ending. Once I get this finished, get this published and you get to read it, then you can see for yourself how Lyra goes on a Hero’s Journey.
Who knew that a concept I associate with math, that dreaded subject, would help me write?
Guess that means I need to keep an open mind.
I’ll look for a formula to help me with that.