Hi, crew. This week’s newsletter has a little heft. But there is a choose-your-own adventure aspect later, so it can be slightly less hefty if you choose.
Let’s crack open some stories.
Of Blue’s Clues and Rom Coms
There’s one particular part of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point that I think about often. It’s when he talks about, of all things, the children’s show Blue’s Clues. (Side note, did you see Steve’s explanation about why he left? #millennialmoment)
One of the big takeaways from the show’s success was that children have the attention span and appetite for story narratives, which I admit is interesting and relevant to the subject of this newsletter (and probably why so many millennials vibed with Steve’s recent video), but I’m going to skip over that for another takeaway, which is that Blue’s Clues had the audacity to play the same episode every day FOR A WEEK, and kids ate it up. Why? Because the repetition gave them time to learn every part of the story and become familiar with what came next.
You’d think that would only work on kids, but that’s not the case at all. Adults thrive on repetition, patterns, and predictability. The never-ending stream of rom coms, heist movies, and everything in between is proof. When was the last time the trajectory of a rom com or heist movie was unfamiliar? Even if the details of the story were different and unpredictable, the path was the same predictable structure. Yet we still love them.
A Journey with a Quote Unquote Hero
In the words of Dan Harmon, creator of Community, the structure and patterns of story (aka the “hero’s journey”) are “hardwired into your nervous system.”
The hero’s journey was first popularized in Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He assigns more than a baker’s dozen’s worth of stages to the hero’s journey—17 to be exact. That’s a lot. But Dan Harmon summarizes it into a more palatable eight stages. This is what I use to map out any story I’m consuming or creating.
And if that’s still too many stages, the hero’s journey can be boiled down further into two stages:
Descend into the unknown
Return changed
Why Should I Care?
Now that we’ve got some basics on the hero’s journey, you can choose your own adventure and dive a little deeper depending on what kind of story person you are: 1) storyteller, 2) story liver, or 3) story appreciator. And let it be known, I don’t love the phrase “story liver,” but I’ve already hit send and it’s too late to change it now.
1. Why STORYTELLERS Should Care About the Hero’s Journey
The hero’s journey is a fact of life—like Captain Crunch cutting the roof of your mouth or sand getting in your crack at the beach. And the sooner you accept it, the sooner you can see it for what it is. It’s not a boundary that restricts your creativity as a storyteller, it’s the blank slate that allows you to create infinitely. Or maybe a wheel is a better example. Whatever your car or earth mover or motorcycle or wheelbarrow or trike or unicycle looks like on top, it still needs a wheel to go.
Even if you are striving to create a groundbreaking story or character that doesn’t follow the hero’s journey, our wise friend Dan Harmon from the last section has pointed out that the act of trying to break the form is literally an example of a descent into the unknown. So whether you’re living the hero’s journey or the characters in your story are, you can’t escape it.
Checking your story against the stages is a solid way to ensure that the people reading or watching or listening to your story can follow along and feel what you want them to feel. Remember, we’re all just grown up Blue’s Clues fans. Though we like novelty and surprise, if a story has no structure or familiar rhythm, it’s difficult to experience those feelings. But there is plenty of blank space within the structure to use innovative story strategies.
2. Why STORY LIVERS Should Care About the Hero’s Journey
If all these circles and stages and structures are too much for you, no problem. We can focus on the two-stage approach to the hero’s journey: descend into the unknown and return changed.
Think about any of your favorite life stories. I would bet all my Taco Bell allowance (probably more than you think) that every one of them involves you doing something you are unsure about. You went on a road trip. You asked the cute guy/girl out at the store. You took a risk. You pushed yourself. You tried something new.
I would also bet all my pizza allowance (even more than my Taco Bell allowance) that there was some hiccup or enhanced moment of doubt along the way. Deep down we know that a good life has setbacks—no matter how strongly we hope otherwise. If you learn to see your setbacks as spices that make your life story better, and embrace or even seek out opportunities to descend into the unknown, you’ll find more meaning and fulfillment in life. (Bonus: you’ll have more “back in my day” stories than your grandkids can shake a stick at.)
3. Why STORY APPRECIATORS Should Care About the Hero’s Journey
Have you ever walked out of a movie (or, in the covid-era, remained sitting on your couch after a movie) and thought “Dang, that was a good movie”? But then if someone asked what was good about it, you might explain parts that you remembered, but not quite be able to adequately pinpoint why it was “good.” Then one thing leads to another and you find yourself climbing onto desks in madness proclaiming yourself a sexy cat as Abed on Community did in the class Nicolas Cage: Good or Bad?
If you know how to break up a movie into the stages of the hero’s journey, it becomes more clear why it all works, thus eliminating the need to spend hours filling a worthless four-inch binder with details about why a movie was “good.”
Quote of the Week
This week’s quote comes from the author I named my sourdough starter1 after, Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis. Lewis is talking to his friend J.R.R. Tolkien over lunch. Tolkien has just completed The Hobbit, but he is stuck and bored with his new hobbit book only a few chapters in.
“The problem is that hobbits are only interesting when they’re in un-hobbit-like situations.”
Lewis, with a sound understanding of story structure and the need to descend into the unknown, may have been a crucial reason we now have The Lord of the Rings. (H/T Real Artists Don’t Starve by Jeff Goins)
Thanks for reading,
Braden
My starter’s name is Clive Sourdough Lewis