Hero's Journey and Creative Structure

The Hero's Journey is the template upon which the cast majority of successful screenplays are built upon.

One quite significant benefit of the Hero's Journey is that it provides the screenwriter with a formidable structure.

Structure is critical to creative output.

Whilst many argue that structure is inhibitive, in fact the reverse is true (unless it is used to the point where it induces conformity).

There are various forms of structure:

Short term goals (incremental productivity) produce more output than a "do your best" approach. With specific regard to creative writing, writing four pages a day completes a words-on-paper first draft screenplay in one month. A "do your best" or "waiting for inspiration" approach can take months or years. Witness the untold number of people with unfinished manuscripts under their beds.

Simply being prolific improves performance and quality. The single best creative product tends to appear at that point in the career when the creator is being most prolific.

Frameworks such as the Hero's Journey reduce complex problems into their component intellectual parts. Frameworks increase output by reducing complex problems into smaller, more manageable problem solving exercises. A similar idea is that problems, no matter how daunting, can be solved by breaking them into their constituent parts.

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