Looking for a Hero: The Call to Adventure

In the second stage of the hero's journey, the Ordinary World is threatened or disrupted in some way that requires a hero to step forward and embark upon a journey that in the end will restore order.

A monster is threatening the town. A damsel is in distress.

The problem is identified and with it a goal to reverse the problem. The One ring must be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom.

Other key players are introduced, including a messenger. The messenger may be someone from within the Ordinary World or outside it, but it's his job to explain to the hero that she is the only one who can go off and set things right again. Though the protagonist is often an underdog and the least likely to pull off any kind of heroic endeavor, the messenger is certain: There is no one else who will volunteer, or if there is, there is no one else as well-suited and equipped as the protagonist to undergo a journey such as this.

Often, the hero is already drawn to the Special World because her chief wish is related in some way to this place. Though she resists it (fears it), her destiny is tied to the Special World, and so she must answer the call and embark upon the journey.

In his novel Winter's Bone, author Daniel Woodrell treats the call to adventure a little differently. His protagonist, Ree Dolly, is a 17-year-old girl whose father, a meth cooker, has jumped bail. The sherrif shows up to explain to Ree that unless her father turns up in court when he's supposed to, their house and land will be handed over to the bondsman who stood good for her father's bail. No one can find him, but Ree tells the sherrif she will do it. (She volunteers for the call to adventure, whereas most heroes refuse the call, at least initially.)

The hero's journey isn't a formula guaranteed to produce something artful. You can't punch in A x B and get C. That's certainly not what I'm looking for anyway. I doubt you are either. It's a pattern of life as it already exists. Joseph Campbell merely pointed it out, said 'Hey, look what we've been doing. Look at our stories, the way we tell them.' Plotting feels so unnatural to some of us, but it's part of our craft. We're obligated to understand how art works. The beautiful thing about the hero's journey is you don't see it lying on top of stories. Sometimes you do. There are stories that are obviously constructed around the journey myth. But there are plenty of others that don't show their neckbolts quite so apparently. Art is artifice. There's no way around that. We are cobbling things together. But if we're good enough, we can go back and hide the ugly stitches. We can do what really great actors do, and that is we can make an audience forget we're there or that the whole thing is make-believe. Or else we can inhabit a story so completely that a reader doesn't care. This is what Daniel Woodrell has done. It's what Faulkner did and Nabokov and Tolstoy and Salinger and almost every writer you can name.

So stage 2: someone or some thing tells the protagonist to man up, to get to getting. It's scary as hell (sort of like writing a novel), but it must be done. And there's only one person who can do it. You.