-The Hero's Journey-
All stories are about conflict, even love stories. If there’s no conflict, there’s no story. And conflict doesn’t mean people running around and getting into fights every other page. It means the overall conflict that the characters are facing in their lives: what is the problem they have to solve? What is standing in their way that’s stopping them from achieving their goals? Sometimes conflict can be between a character and himself; his own internal problems. E.g.; the Fox’s conflict within himself over his homosexuality in The Silurian; or a greater conflict that comes from the outside world, or a combination of both external and internal conflict, as again in The Silurian.
Take a careful reading of any novel and see what the conflicts are that motivate the characters. If there’s no conflict, there’s nothing to motivate them to do what it is that they do. In fact, it is the nature of the conflict within the characters lives that forms the plot. A story without character conflict has no discernible plot. And without conflict a novel will become nothing more than a series of scenes, each following on from the other until the end, where the reader will ask, ‘what was all that about?’ No conflict, no plot, and an author risks losing his readers through lack of emotional involvement with the characters, thus with the novel itself. A simple question for an author to ask is: what does your hero want? What is he seeking—his goal? And what is it that’s standing in his way that’s stopping him from achieving what he wants? If a character doesn’t want anything, then what is his story really about?
Advice for new writers: try to bring in conflict as soon as possible into your story and this will set up tension and emotional involvement, not just for the hero but the reader as well.
-The Hero-
If you’re looking to write a novel with resonance, or what I call pointy stories (stories with a point), then think and be a creative writer on a mythic scale and have your characters go on the ‘Heroes Journey’ (see note at the end of this article). Sometimes this is a literal journey, like Frodo and Sam’s journey to Mordor in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings; and other times it is a symbolic journey through life, where heroes challenge themselves or their societies; to test the boundaries of what is possible, thereby enacting change—true heroes change their societies in some way; they not only risk their own lives for the greater good of their society, but they bring about a change in doing so. In The Silurian, Prince Bedwyr the Fox risked his own princedom and cantref by choosing to fight for the greater good of Britain with Arthur, rather than stay a local warlord in his larger Gwynedd dynasty; this choice came back to punish him in Book Five of the Silurian: Longhand, White-tooth, and The Fox. This is the heroes’ journey: Bedwyr challenged his own society and by doing so, became a hero that helped Britain to survive the Saxon invasions, and standing firm at Arthur’s side, he told his whole world: I fight for the greater good…
Arthur himself is of course the essential hero, and his own hero’s journey is no less fraught with challenges to authority than the Fox’s. Arthur challenged more than Bedwyr did; in that he challenged the very rule of Britain itself, for like Bedwyr, he knew he must do this in order for Britain to survive the coming threat of the sea-wolves: the Saxons.
Sometimes these challenges in fiction are wholly successfully, when your protagonist will attain true heroship, or sometimes they fail and it becomes a tragedy, as Arthur's story was in the final end. The point being, as always, is what the heroes do on their journey that’s important. The Journey itself.
So on this journey some kind of change needs to have taken place for the heroes or their society; e.g.—the gaining of some profound knowledge that was lacking before; both literal knowledge, like my character Jes Jarldane in Son of the Sun when he returns the knowledge of science and reason to a dark world governed by superstition. This is the Heroes Journey: the setting out on his trails, the journey that will win some great prize, the ‘Holy Grail’ that he then brings back to his society in order to change it or evolve it into something better. Or in an anti-hero way, for the worse: like Sir Mordred does in the King Arthur romance stories, when he destroys the Golden Age of Camelot and breaks the Round Table Fellowship.
To expand on conflict and the Heroes Journey—this brings in the villain himself; the ‘bad guy’, the antagonist who puts up barriers before the hero to stop him from achieving his goals.
A lot of writers just don’t have good antagonists or make use of their great anti-hero powers to hold a compelling story together. My own personal opinion of the antagonist is the same as the hero—even the bad guy exacts change of some kind; he leaves his mark, usually for the worst, but he still leaves his mark, because he has pushed the boundaries and challenged his society just as did the hero. Sir Mordred is again the perfect example of the essential ‘bad guy’ who left his mark on the world; his name and Arthur’s are now forever bound together, like twins on a wheel eternally turning around each other in the symbolic battle between good and evil, and yet they are one; the dark and the light of each other. Not as father and son as in all other Arthurian stories, but peers, cousins in The Silurian, who are opposites to each other, ying and yang, one fair, the other dark, and yet it is Arthur here who is the dark one; a symbolic reversal of the natural order--a trick of the light.
Advice to new writers is: make your ‘bad guy’ as mythic and as powerful as your hero, thus they counterbalance each other in a constant battle of powers: light and dark, day and night, awake and asleep, conscious and unconscious, they are each other. Once a new writer understands the mythical, symbolic and metaphorical power of stories, of your hero and your anti-hero, your writing will suddenly open on a whole new world of possibilities and powerful conflict.
This brings in redemption for the anti-hero. The antagonist is still a part of the Hero’s Journey; maybe it was the hero himself who helps the bad guy reach redemption and thus, everything that was once broken, is now made whole again at the end and the story comes full circle. In darker stories, everything is already whole, and that wholeness is broken, like the Round Table, by an antagonist who never learns his lessons from the hero. It is all a part of the mythical cycle, and both redemption and failure are of equal value in story-telling; something is learned, and the thing that is lost is mourned for its inherent value. (That ‘you don’t know what it is that you have till it’s gone’ truth).
A lot of writers never make full use of their antagonists, and yet they are essential to the hero’s journey; without the ‘bad guy’ always standing in the way, how do you know your hero is a hero? As doing good works isn’t enough to prove he is a hero, for he could be doing his goods works purely for his own selfish end. Without the bad guy, how do we know the good guy is the good guy?
A good antagonist will raise the stakes, create tension (will the hero overcome or not?) and juxtapose himself as a contrast to the hero. No antagonist too means no conflict, and again, this means no story, no emotional tension, and renders the whole thing boring and flat. The hero must have his antagonist there all through the story in some form or other; if he’s not there in person, he must be there in ‘spirit’, burrowing his way into the hero’s tortured psyche.
The anti-hero also doesn’t even have to belong to an opposing group, or the enemy. He can be a ‘friendly antagonist’ like Captain Jack Sparrow is to Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan in the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. What would this story be without Jack Sparrow? The ‘bad boy’ is often the most interesting character in a story and it’s often through his actions that heroes can rise or fall. Or again like Han Solo in the original and best Star Wars—that bad boy whose really a good boy is a great character of conflict within himself (played by Bedwyr in The Silurian).
And in The Silurian, Medraut gravitates between friendly camps and enemy camps—Medraut’s power is that he can enter both, and a reader may be left wondering exactly in which camp he truly belongs; this raises the emotional tension, for you can never be sure whether he will betray Arthur in the end or not. Mordred’s traditional role is the ultimate betrayer—but The Silurian is a heroic mythic journey and it challenges its own genre…Medraut may or may not betray Arthur, for here his role is not set in stone.
Every hero must have his ‘kryptonite’ (his antagonist); the one thing that weakens him, or threatens to break his spirit or to bring him down before he can overcome all the odds stacked against him. In The Silurian for example, Arthur says a number of times to Bedwyr, "You are the one man who can bring me to my knees..." Bedwyr is Arthur's kryptonite...
Thus the hero, in order to be a hero at all, must pass through great trails and ordeals; he must pass through the fire and the crucible and come out either transformed into a true hero, or he dies within the flames in a tragic end.
If a hero has no outer antagonist, he needs to be in conflict with himself or someone close to him that he cares about, and who cares about him. This raises the stakes again, creates tension and emotional involvement between character and reader, and compels us to read on merely to find out what will happen next.
-A note about Context-
Another thing that can be added to a story to create a greater meaning is context; that is a larger background conflict against which the main action takes place and can be juxtaposed against, contrasted with or mirrored.
In The Silurian for instance, the context is the British struggle for survival in the face of foreign invasions. Arthur, of course, becomes the savior who rescues his people from Saxon oppression, only to fall to his own people in the end. But on his journey to become a great leader, he lives his own private life of conflicts, mostly in The Silurian with his foster-brother, Bedwyr the Fox. So in The Silurian, the struggles of these two men, and sometimes with Medraut, are played out against the larger background of external threats. If someone manages to bring Arthur down, this will leave Britain open to Saxon invasion, for Arthur is the British shield against Saxon aggression, and so the stakes are raised and Arthur’s life and survival becomes paramount.
Context gives a greater imperative to the story and the heroes lives that makes their survival so much more important. Having a strong context can help raise the level of tension in a story and add background colour and interest; context can make the lives of the characters even more real and crucial to their societies. That is, the risks they take to survive then come to mean an awful lot more if their possible failure will take everyone else down with them.
Footnote: For those interested in knowing more about the ‘Heroes Journey’ try “The Writer’s Journey: 3rd Edition: Mythic structure for writers’ by Christopher Vogler. This book explains really well the many different character archetypes that exist in all cultures through all time in legend and myth, and why they are so important to good story-telling and fiction construction.
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