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Took me 3 weeks to realize my plot outline was just the hero's journey again
I was stuck on a fantasy novel outline, kept hitting the same wall every night. Finally printed out my outline and compared it to a wiki page for the hero's journey. It was beat for beat the same structure, I just had renamed the mentor and called the threshold a 'rift gate.' I wasted 3 weeks building a framework I already knew and hated. Has anyone else fallen into a pattern they swore they were avoiding? How do you catch it earlier?
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shanes6614d ago
Laughing out loud because I did basically the same thing with a sci-fi script a few years back. Spent a month mapping out this big rebellion arc, complete with the reluctant leader and the wise old engineer who sacrifices himself, and then my buddy casually mentioned it reminded him of Star Wars. I pulled up the hero's journey chart and yeah, it was exactly that, just with spaceships and different names. The worst part is I remember telling myself I was avoiding the classic structure, but I guess my brain just defaulted to what it knew. What finally helped me was writing the ending first, then working backwards, because that forced me to think about what the character actually needs instead of just plugging in stages.
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