Supernatural Underground: 2023: Call to Adventure 2.0

Friday, February 3, 2023

2023: Call to Adventure 2.0

by Amanda Arista

2023: Reimagining the Hero's Journey- a Call to Adventure

In today’s world of insta-nowness, writers no longer have a few pages to hook readers. We have a sentence. And if that sentence is any good, we might have a paragraph. Opening lines are key to not only getting readers attention, but letting them know the what and how of your novel. Letting them know exactly what kind of adventure they are promising.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813).

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. - George Orwell, 1984 (1949).

“I’ve watched through is eyes, listened through his ears, and I tell you, he’s the one.”- Orson Scott Card Ender’s Game (1997).

All of these first lines not only are intriguing, but tell us exactly how the writer is going to tell the story. We know that Ender's Game is going to intense the whole time. We know that 1984 is going to be dystopian. We know that Pride and Prejudice is going to be about society's need for a wife. All of these first lines draw you in immediately to the world of the story.

In the Hero's Journey, the Call to Adventure is the world of the story calling the hero to make something better. It is the world of the story summoning the hero to greatness. Something within that world is wrong, and the hero is in a perfect position to fix it. The Call is usually an event or a character that presents the future hero with a quest, a mission, a plea for help. Depending on the book, it is a character who announced a murder, a dragon who has just set a town on fire, or a general who has selected his next weapon. This call is usually right there in the hero's face with a trumpet blaring out his request. Its easy to spot and even easier to refuse (but that is next month's post).

Unfortunately, real life is not as blunt. You don't wake up in the morning and know that your whole day is going to be dystopian, or snarky, or intense. You just have to face the day and see what comes, what calls. And most of the time in real life, these Calls are not as epic, but still meaningful. Answering a plea to help someone get something from the top shelf is not as heroic as being the savior that will win a galactic war.

Unless you focus on the world of the story. Life is made up of a million stories- every person you meet is part of their own story. And their plea for help to get something from the top shelf of a store, that you very easily accomplished, might not feel like a Call to Adventure. But that might have been the last ingredient they needed to make their mother's favorite recipe. You might have just changed a whole world with that can of tomatoes. You might have been a hero that they needed in that moment in the world of the Grocery store, in a quest to make an excellent soup.

So in this year of re-imagining, let's listen for different calls for adventuring. Because without the adventure, we ourselves can't go from Zero to Hero.