Hero Work, Part 2
The wrong task changes the right hero.
The hero has a setup desire, a goal, and a life dream.
The hero wants change. That’s the start. The hero has a goal to be achieved (or not) by the end of the story. The hero may even have a life dream that may exceed the scope of the story.
But what happens in the middle? What happens between the hero’s desire, which starts the story, and the hero’s goal, which ends it?
This is the TASK or the MISSION or the JOURNEY or the WORK. This is the ACTION or the ADVENTURE or the PURSUIT of the big, bold middle of your story.
HERO -> TASK -> GOAL
And the trick is to set for your hero a task that is at odds in some way with who they are at the start of the story so that, by completing this task, the hero is transformed by the end.
OLD HERO -> TASK -> NEW HERO
or
HERO IS STUCK -> TASK -> HERO HAS GROWN
It’s like when you try to learn something new. Say you want to learn to play piano, but you’re in your thirties and have never been musical. You feel like it’s too late, and you’re probably going to be terrible. But someone inspires you, and so you embark on an education.
HERO -> PIANO LESSONS
You take lessons, struggle, resist, practice, test your mind, and put your body through the paces. Your friends and relatives mock you and think you’re wasting your time. You’re not getting better as fast as the other students are, so you want to quit before the recital, before you’re publically humiliated.
HERO -> PIANO LESSONS -> QUIT?
But someone inspires you, so you practice in a new way, stop resisting, trust yourself, play the recital, and learn that the worst that could happen is that you can make terrible mistakes but still survive to become stronger in your sense of self.
HERO -> PIANO LESSONS -> QUIT/PERSIST -> NEW HERO
The task has to be new and challenging and exact costs on the hero that move the hero to summon their will to follow through, adapt, and overcome.
Remember the acts and how to think about them. See my previous entries “The Acts of a Story,” parts 1, 2, and 3.
Act 1: Hero has an unfulfilled desire to play piano but worries the time has passed for such silliness.
Act 2: Hero takes piano lessons despite what others think and slowly but surely makes progress.
Act 3: Hero plays for friends. Friends are mean jerks and laugh. Hero doubts themselves and considers quitting before the recital.
Act 4: Hero persists. Hero plays the recital, makes mistakes, almost stops and walks away, but remembers who they are and who they want to become. Hero finishes the recital and grows into a stronger person.
This is just how growth works.
It’s hard, but this is what it takes for human beings to develop their potential.
So, therefore, we do NOT want generic, typical, or conventional tasks.
And I mean as judged by the current life of the hero: we don’t want generic for them, typical for them, or conventional for them.
We don’t want a cook to serve the usual order to a repeat customer. We don’t want a sports journalist to write about a tie game in the middle of the season. We don’t want a cop to write a parking ticket, a private detective to track another cheating husband, or a spy to file paperwork after going on a routine mission.
We also don’t want a typical family vacation, a generic wedding, a smooth flight, or a nice meal with friends.
Most people live these kinds of days every day. They go to work; they do their jobs; they come home. They go out to eat; they eat; they come home. They exercise, shop for groceries, visit family, and come home.
The routine of daily life does change people over time (in good and bad ways), but it doesn’t change people in dramatic ways.
And that’s what we want: we want our hero to make hard choices, act on them, fight through the consequences, and change. And we want them to change within the compressed span of a novel, play, or movie.
When we first meet our hero in Act 1, that’s when we want to establish the conventions of this hero’s current life. The hero wants more out of life, but to show that, we have to show the hero at odds with, unhappy with, or uninspired by the current state of their jobs, relationships, home life, and leisure activities.
They are stuck in every aspect of their lives: home, work, love, and play.
What do they do? Where do they live? Whom do they love? And what do they do for fun?
In the first act, the answers to these questions, for your hero, reveal an unfulfilled life that our hero wants to change, even if they don’t know how just yet.
The Act 1 Catalyst will invite the hero to embark on a task that feels wrong to them because it’s new, scary, and daunting. They know it’s going to ask more of them than they’ve ever had to give. They worry they don’t have it in them to persevere. They’re afraid to pay the costs of embarking on this journey, of working in this new, potentially humiliating way, of taking on this dangerous mission. They’re afraid that by undertaking this task, they might find out, finally, whether or not they are equal to their dreams.
And won’t it crush their spirit to learn they don’t have what it takes to achieve their dream? Won’t it be safer to stay home and go back to their little routines and keep their dreams to themselves?
It would be safer, but we’re not interested in safer. Safer is Act 1. This is a story. So we want change. We want Acts 2, 3, and 4. We want the grueling, exhilarating adventure of transformation. We want to witness a human being trudge through the mud before they blossom into their fullest personality.
So the hero has to accept the challenge, which means they have to let their Act 1 self die, metaphorically. The hero of dull convention and easy routine must be allowed to die in the death moment towards the end of Act 1, when the hero dismisses their fears and accepts the mission and embarks on this journey.
Goodbye to the Old Self! Hello to the New Task!
And thus the hero begins the TASK at the start of Act 2.
So what the heck is this task?
I could list examples of cool tasks from movies and novels, but in my own life as a writer, I don’t think about existing novels or movies at this stage. It doesn’t help me to consider the long list of classic novels and blockbuster movies. I find that kind of depressing, almost like their very existence makes me want to quit.
I need to think about my desires and dreams, about my own life and what I know and what I’m interested in. I need to inspire myself to write my own work, and what inspires me may be very different from what inspires you.
In a previous entry, I wrote about the unique DNA of a writer (“Your Unique Storyteller’s DNA”). What kinds of stories am I driven to tell? I discovered, after years (okay, decades), that I like to write about the positive transformation of an active, self-aware hero who embarks on a task that has a supernatural or futuristic element.
I’m not devoted to a particular genre of story. I’ve written horror, coming-of-age, rom com, tech noir, sci-fi, and wish fulfillment. What ties these novels together isn’t the genre but, instead, the nature of the storyline: self-aware heroes embark on an adventure tinged with an element of the supernatural or futuristic.
A young girl has to beat the devious obstacle courses of the smarthome that raised her in order to earn her freedom. | Smarthome Rebel
A burnt-out merc has to hunt down and capture his best friend, a saboteur, before he bombs a nefarious nanotech company. | Work Order
A young man has to face his past to overcome an evil curse and move on with his life. | A Box Came for You
In each of these, I have a hero I can identify with (aware, active, passionate), an antagonist that has some supernatural or futuristic aspect (evil smarthome, evil nanotech company, evil monster), and a task that challenges that hero to their limit (completing relentless obstacle courses, handing over a best friend to an evil client, and enduring the torturous attacks of an undead spirit).
So when I’m thinking about my next novel, I review what I’ve done in past books. Do I want to do the same thing? Do I want to write a sequel? Do I want to explore a different kind of task, work, journey, adventure? What kind of supernatural/futuristic antagonist can I sic on my hero this time?
And that last question is what tends to be the key to unlocking the task I set for my hero in my next story.
I tend to ask myself a form of this question: “Wouldn’t it be cool if a bad guy . . . ?” And then I fill in the blank.
Wouldn’t it be cool if a smarthome forced someone to complete a devilish obstacle course to escape?
Wouldn’t it be cool if a tech company forced someone to track down and neutralize a saboteur who turned out to be their best friend?
Wouldn’t it be cool if a cursed spirit emerged from stolen moving boxes and haunted someone trapped in an apartment?
The task is set by the antagonist and defined by the nature of the antagonist. And given the nature of the task, I ask myself what kind of hero would be transformed by this task.
Who would be trapped in a smarthome? What kind of hero would want their freedom? What kind of hero would persist through the obstacle courses to earn their freedom?
What kind of person would be hired to track down a saboteur? What kind of person would have a friend who turned out to be a saboteur? What kind of person would turn over their best friend to a nefarious entity?
What kind of person would steal moving boxes? What kind of person would be able to do battle with a cursed spirit trapping them in their apartment?
These questions take a long time to think about. It’s not easy. But I mull over the possibilities for a long while until I hit on a good protagonist.
I chose a young girl to be the test subject for a prototype smarthome. The smarthome was designed to raise her, and the obstacle courses are designed to prepare her for the outside world. When she completes them, she will be free.
I chose a burnt-out private-security agent to be the one hired to track down his best friend, with whom he shares a complicated past. He doesn’t really want the job, but he does want to retire . . . and to see his best friend again, even if his best friend has gone down a dark path in life.
I chose a young man who missed out on his youth because he had to care for an ailing, abusive mother, so when he can finally move out on his own, at the age of twenty-five, he will be desperate enough to steal moving boxes. He’ll also be young enough and driven enough to battle a demon.
Sometimes you can start with a hero when you are considering your story. I’ve done this. When you do this, you have to explore different antagonists until you land on the right one, on the one that will set a daunting task for your hero. I’ve written rite-of-passage novels (coming of age and midlife crisis), and when you do that, you want to create antagonists who embody the resistance of the heroes to accept and embrace their rite of passage (growing up or growing older).
But I’ve also started out with particular antagonists, like the evil smarthome, an evil spirit arising out of a moving box, and an evil tech company misusing nanobiotechnology. I often find the right task faster when I start with the antagonist than I do when I start with the hero.
In the next entry, I’ll explore how to develop a cool task by starting with an antagonist with a supernatural or futuristic element.
_____
