When using the archetypal pattern of the hero’s journey to structure a story, writers can carefully look through the elements and design their characters and story around those elements. This article is the 4th in a series that explains how to use the hero’s journey pattern in writing a story. Each article explains one or more elements of the journey. This one concerns the Supernatural Aid and Crossing the 1st Threshold.
Supernatural Aid
What or who sends people out on the journeys of their lives? What or who serves as an aid in those first steps in the process of becoming wiser, stronger?
In the picture book Where the Wild Things Are, Max misbehaves and is sent to his room. His mother calls him, “Wild Thing!” and Max responds, “I’ll eat you up.” That night, Max’s room becomes a forest that grows and grows until “the walls became the world all around.” Then, Max sailed to the land of the wild things. Max’s mother is the initiator of this journey—and though she is not supernatural, her influence upon Max is.
In the Greek myth of Psyche and Eros, an oracle determines that Psyche will be wed to a monster, and it’s through Aphrodite’s arrangements that Psyche begins her path of initiation. And later, Aphrodite gives Psyche her challenges on her path. Aphrodite: jealous or protective? Vengeful or motivational? What matters is she aids Psyche in becoming . . . the butterfly.
Writers can ask about their characters: What or who aids the hero in the journey of discovery? What sort of character or conflict plays this role? Will it be a person with true supernatural powers? Or someone whose influence feels supernatural? Writers might find it helpful to describe that Aid in a paragraph or free-writing. Another idea is to have an “interview” with the Supernatural Aid.
Crossing the 1st Threshold
When the hero arrives at the first threshold, he or she has arrived, according to Joseph Campbell, at the “entrance to the zone of magnified power.” . . . Beyond is “darkness, the unknown, and danger.” When Max in Where the Wild Things Are defies his mother to answer his call to adventure, he creates an imaginary forest and a boat named MAX, which he boarded and “sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are.”
Psyche crosses the first threshold as she arrives at the mountaintop in response to the oracle’s message that she shall meet her fate there. Crossing the threshold embodies taking the purposeful step that moves the hero from the known world into one of unfamiliarity and risk. What will you have your hero do that marks a step over that border, a step into the real risk-taking the journey will hold?
For the three preceding articles in this series see:
Journey in Words: The Hero Pattern as Writing Guide
Journey in Words: The Writing Year with the Hero’s Journey
Journey in Words: The Call to Adventure and the Refusal
For the next article, see:
Journey in Words: Belly of the Whale
References:
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New World Library, 2008.
Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are. HarperCollins, 1963.
Shaun Perkins - Shaun Perkins, teacher, poet, storyteller, porch-sitter, beekeeper, gardener, writer, has been a high school and university teacher for ...
Join the Conversation