The importance of the ordinary

Slicing and dicing up the hero's journey

We’re all familiar, at least on some level, with the “hero’s journey” story formula. Certainly, it’s traceable as the scaffolding beneath many fiction works, but it’s not too shabby of a helper in non-fiction/memoir, either, though the proverbial “hero” is then an object, an event, or even the author themselves in the non-fiction version.

In any case, so much emphasis gets put on the apex of the story, and, don’t get me wrong, it should— you can’t very well tell a good story unless some kind of shit happens. You have to have a “so what?” or it’s just page after page of details about your workday or whatever with nothing ever happening beyond that. Hard pass.

But, there is an early phase of the classic hero's journey that gets overlooked too often, if not outright breathlessly leaped over: the before-time; setting up the pre-quest world of the ordinary. What was the subject of the story doing before the big action of the story even happened? Take the time to set this universe up because it’s a great place to reveal a lot about the subject’s nature and helps the audience get invested— an investment you may need later in the story when your subject does less favorable crap. So if we’re talking memoir, take the time to set up who you were before this wild event happened and you had to make hard decisions. If we’re talking about a non-fiction piece about, say, the origin of the smartphone, then taking the time to talk about communication prior to its invention keeps its role top of mind to the reader by setting the stage.