The main reason I disagree with people who claim every story fits the hero’s journey is that it’s not the only character arc out there, and it really doesn’t fit every story. While I wasn’t sure why exactly my story doesn’t fit the description when I wrote the post on The Hero’s Journey – My Pros and Cons, my late yet intense study of Story Structure made things much clearer to me. So I’m excited to share my conclusions with you!Character arcs. A character starts out as some guy, then stuff happens and he does some pretty crazy shit, which in turn changes who he is so he becomes a different guy. The end.In all honesty, character arcs are so easy to explain because we’ve all experienced them. None of us is still the person we were with three years of age, or thirteen, or thirty. We all change, some for the better, some for the worse, and some change sideways. Hey, it’s alright, as long as we move on. It’s the same with characters, they move on as the story progresses, but the WAY in which they move on usually falls into one of three major categories.Here be definitions.
*The Change Arc — this is our good old “hero’s journey”, which basically has the protagonist change from an unlikely fellow into a savior and hero. This transformation is quite radical, and despite some inner strength that was “always within him”, pretty much all else about the protagonist changes drastically by the end of the story. See More . . .