The Story Biz Podcast

Danielle Hitchens had an idea for a book, she found her artist and then lead a successful funding campaign on social media that also resulted in a publisher picking up the book and creating a best selling series.

Great stories are filled with great characters. One of the most common characters in any story is the Mentor, a must-include character if you’re writing a Hero’s Journey story. In fact, the next step of the Hero’s Journey is Meeting the Mentor. Who is your hero’s Mentor, and how do they challenge them? Meeting the Mentor occurs after the hero has been Called to Adventure and discovered that the task ahead will be incredibly difficult. The Mentor then provides the hero with training (physical, mental, spiritual, or a combination thereof) and often accompanies the hero on the journey. 

The mentor is frequently an older or “wiser” character no longer able to fulfill the heroic role on his or her own. If you don't have a character in the mentor role yet in your story...it's time you got one!

Refusing the Call is the first step in our character's eventual acceptance of the journey our story will take them on. Our heroine refuses to break out of her shell and go on an unsupervised camping trip with her friends because...well...she just isn't ready for that kind of adventure. The jock blows off the spring play auditions because he's not ready to try something new and set aside his friend's and parent's expectations of who he is. Every decision to leave the ordinary behind comes with a healthy debate of what is really at stake. Give your heroine something to chew on before diving into the adventure, and let us watch her wrestle with it for awhile.

What wakes your character up? What puts them into motion and pushes them to explore something new? This is the Call to Adventure!

The call might be internal. A longing inside the hero, like an itch they are compelled to scratch. Dorothy is literally picked up by an act of God and put back down in the special world of her story, but the reason she isn't safe in the storm cellar where she should have been is because she was drawn to run away by an inner longing for something she couldn't find at home. Anyone who watches The Wizard of Oz feels Dorothy's longing when she sings Somewhere Over the Rainbow.