Day 91 Q: Who’s the Hero of Your Story?

A: Obviously, each of us is the Hero of our own story. When I say Hero, I mean Heroine, Protagonist, Main Character, Star of the Show, Point-of-View Character, Dude, The Big Guy, Harry Potter. The one who owns the story.

You, in your show. Me, in mine.

But some of us forget that sometimes. We get stuck in Best Supporting roles. (Not really, of course, because the camera of our lives is still focused squarely on us. It just seems that way in our own dumb little minds.) What happens, I think, is that it’s easy to slip into a passive role, to let events happen, rather than take action to direct those events.

Good stories have main characters we root for, because they are active, decisive. They act on their own behalf. (That’s why they call them “actors.”)

We can’t help but be the Hero of our own story. Whoever owns the show is the main character. Period. Real life heroes are also active; they live on their own behalf. (Yet we don’t call them “livers.” Hm.)

As you may have guessed, I’ve just returned from another day with Michael Hauge, talking about story structure, the inner and outer journeys traveled by characters over the course of a movie or novel. After the talk concluded, he challenged us as writers – and as evolving human beings – to ask ourselves the same question we must pose to our characters.

What is the next specific, significant step I can take

on my journey to my goal?

Then, fill in the blank:

“I’ll do whatever it takes to (insert the step identified above)

but just don’t ask me to ________.

This blank is the thing that stands in our way, it’s the thing keeping us from finding our True Selves, going from Identity to Essence, from immature to differentiated, child to adult, asleep to awake, pathetic orphan to best-ever wizard, etc. There are all sorts of psychological explanations for this process, but I think we all understand the concept. There’s the ordinary people we are in our ordinary lives; and then there’s that potential to be extraordinary that lies within each of us.

Hero material. We’ve all got it.

We just have to get out of our own way.