Hero Work, Part 1

So, like, what is the hero actually doing?

Heroes can’t be sitting around. Heroes gotta do stuff.

The task, job, mission, assignment, undertaking, enterprise . . .

And in a novel or screenplay, what the hero does can’t be a series of little busybody activities the whole time. 

 . . . endeavor, quest, expedition, journey, venture, odyssey . . .

Gotta be some serious actions that build toward a significant goal.

The actions are significant, that is, in the life of this particular hero in this particular story (and by “hero,” I mean main character or protagonist).

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it . . .”

“One last job . . .”

“One last heist . . .”

“One last case to solve . . .”

“One more race, tournament, bout, battle, game, trip, deal, scheme, con . . .”

“One last shot at freedom . . .”

“One more chance at love . . .”

This is something I often forget about. It’s weird. It’s a weird thing to have a blind spot about. I often forget, when thinking about my next story, what the hero is physically doing scene to scene, chapter to chapter. 

It’s not enough to have a starting point A and an end point Z. Sure, your hero has a desire. Yeah, your hero has a goal. But those things aren’t actions. We begin with desire. We end with a goal. What happens in between the desire and the goal during the main part of, you know, the story? Think of a movie. What are we watching the actor actually do?

In the previous three entries (“Get the File” Parts 1-3), I’ve explored how to use beats in a chapter to develop the drama of a hero performing some task, a task that can be completed within the span of a single chapter. 

In a novel, there will be many mini-tasks that the hero will need to complete on their journey to achieving their final goal (or not). Picture a large arc of the mission that spans the entire story, from first chapter to last. 

It’s easiest, for this purpose, to picture a road-trip story, with legs of the journey along the way. Think The Last of Us, Little Miss Sunshine, Due Date, On the Road, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The Road, Bucket List, and Planes, Trains, & Automobiles. (See the Golden Fleece genre at savethecat.com.) 

The road-trip story has a final destination, a geographical X that marks the spot, and the journey from A to X defines the hero’s task across the span of the whole story. Within each act of the story, however, there will be sub-tasks to perform (cross the desert, escape the jungle), and within each chapter, there will be mini-tasks to perform (pit stops in the desert, pitfalls in the jungle). 

Imagine these as smaller arcs nesting within larger arcs. You need, say, ten chapter-level tasks to complete a single act-level task, and four act-level tasks to complete the entire story task. 

This is almost sounding silly (these mini-tasks and sub-tasks are starting to sound like chores assigned by a micro-manager), but I think you get the picture. If you want to cook a romantic dinner for an important date (big arc), you have many sub-tasks (little arcs) to go through: finding a recipe, making a shopping list, shopping, unpacking, prepping the ingredients, rinsing, chopping, sauteing, simmering, and so on. 

Act 1: The Preparation

Act 2: The Cooking

Act 3: The Dinner

Act 4: The Clean-up

Within each act, you have stuff to do to complete each stage of this romantic dinner (and to clean up afterwards), and in a story, things always go wrong. Your date is allergic to cats, and your mother stops by insisting that she and her cats (she has twelve) stay with you while her apartment’s being fumigated. The problems are what’s fun and dramatic and, in a good story, life-changing for the hero.

So we’re backing up in this entry from the chapter-level task of “Get the File” to the novel-level task, the long arc of the objective from first chapter to last.

What is the hero actually doing in your story?

Is your hero arresting a drug dealer? Is your hero seducing the boss? Is your hero designing haute couture or dancing ballet or learning to play the drums?

Do you feel like reading about somebody doing this thing? Do you feel like watching somebody do this thing? 

Do you feel like reading about somebody escape a prison, track a serial killer, stage a coup, kill a shark, go undercover, train for a sporting event, start a business, get a journalistic scoop, infiltrate a criminal organization, fall for a get-rich-quick scheme, play in a band, run a restaurant, woo a lover, plan a wedding, start a family, raise kids, bond with a dog, cheat on a spouse, renovate a zoo, build an ark, fight as a gladiator, search for hidden treasure, crash a party, argue in court, change their identity, or save an alien?

I can’t believe I never focused on the action in this conscious way, even after writing several novels, until I read the essay “The Task,” by Terry Rossio. This piece, along with other great pieces about life as a screenwriter, is online at www.wordplayer.com.

Rossio defines the difference between the hero’s goal and the task the hero undertakes to achieve that goal.

The GOAL is often positive and “tied to the essential nature of the protagonist.” It can be “from the heart,” “a basic aspect of the protagonist,” as well as something “universal” the audience can appreciate. So you might have a hero who wants to go home, support their family, protect the town, confess their love, or save someone in danger.

The TASK “is often the opposite—an external problem, imposed by the antagonist, fundamentally at odds with the basic nature of the protagonist.” Rossio cites the example of The Wizard of Oz in which innocent Dorothy, whose heartwarming goal is to return home to her family in Kansas, is tasked with the blood-chilling mission of battling flying monkeys and murdering a wicked witch to steal her broom. “Unique and particular instead of universal, most often distasteful,” writes Rossio, “the task is almost never something the audience would choose to experience directly.”

Why would anyone do this to poor Dorothy? Why would anyone want to watch Dorothy do these things?

The protagonist wants to complete a task that goes against their nature, and “so we get a protagonist who is troubled, challenged, scared, or fundamentally and deeply torn,” writes Rossio. (This is, of course, a fitting description of how someone tries, fails, learns, and grows!) If you as the writer are able to put this kind of dynamic together in your story, “then you’re having fun,” says Rossio.

I already knew the hero had to want something badly enough to suffer the costs of an adventure that would potentially reward them with what they wanted. I’ve mentioned this before (in my entry “The Dilemma”): you don’t want your hero to enjoy a cocktail on a first-class flight to Vegas; you want your hero to endure a cross-country bus ride with a talking skunk. Enduring stinky obstacles proves how badly a hero wants to achieve their goal.

What Rossio clarifies for me is that the function of the task you set for your hero has to be exactly the kind of process that will permanently transform your particular hero. 

It’s a task your hero will likely resist, like Steve Carell’s character in The Forty-year-old Virgin, because the task presents the hero with the demand that they face their greatest fear if they want to achieve their deepest desire.

Genres often come pre-packaged with standard tasks. In a spy thriller, like the novels of Brad Thor, your spy has to prevent a war, which may involve uncovering a mole in their organization and going undercover in a hostile country. In a police procedural, like the novels of Michael Connelly, an outcast cop has to face his past in order to overcome institutional corruption and solve a cold case in the service of truth. 

You can identify similar standard tasks in other genres, like romance and detective and horror and comedy. Your job as a writer, however, whether you’re writing a genre novel or a literary novel or a genre mash-up, is to take those standard tasks (catch a killer, stop a war, confess your love, solve a case, escape from a monster) and add your own twists in two main areas. 

Your hero’s GOAL, as Rossio notes, will likely be universal, primal, and generic, and it can be expressed by a generic noun, like home, family, love, freedom, or justice. So that’s not really where you need a twist. 

Instead, you need to provide unique twists in HERO and TASK and connect the specific character of your hero to the relevant details of the task (which includes the antagonist) so that by performing this daunting task, your hero will be challenged to face their deepest fears and transform permanently by the end of the story.

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