The Road Back
Author Insights: You current project is a dystopian novel with the working title, “Sector 12,” structured as a heroic quest. Can you describe your latest struggles with the book?
L. J. Bonham: “Sector 12” is just one of several projects I’m involved in now, and each has its own challenges. At the moment, I’ve just finished the hero’s ordeal and main crisis which ends Act Two as Christopher Vogler would describe it. Time for Act Three, the road back and the hero’s resurrection.
AI: How has this been a challenge?
LJB: I struggled to differentiate the hero’s crisis from his resurrection. I wrote a high impact ordeal and crisis, if I may say so, which made envisioning the final resurrection difficult. Act Two closes with the hero at his lowest point, captured, tortured, and handed over to a sadistic scientist for experimentation. His friends and allies have been neutralized in several different ways and the antagonist seems ascendant. Yet the hero receives some unexpected help from a surprising source which leads to a direct confrontation with the antagonist and his henchman, whom the hero has sworn to destroy. He must make a choice between satisfying his vengeance and potentially sacrificing himself for the higher cause his friends have embraced. His decision, like all good crises, sets him on a new path and launches the rebel band onto the road back. This was all good stuff but despite a solid plot outline, I just couldn’t see how to play things to the end in a satisfying way.
AI: So how did you resolve this?
LJB: When I get stuck in a book, I often go back to the basics of literary construction, the nuts and bolts of how good stories work. I cracked open Vogler’s book, “The Writer’s Journey” and studied the final movement of the quest story archetype. After rereading this section several times, one thing finally emerged to clarify the issue.
Vogler states that the hero’s crisis is analogous to a college mid-term test and the resurrection is the final exam. This was my “ah-hah” moment. It didn’t take long after that to rethink how the hero would be pursued and what penultimate trial he would face at the story’s climax.
Now all I have to do is sit down and write the darn thing. No rest for the wicked.
L. J. Bonham: “Sector 12” is just one of several projects I’m involved in now, and each has its own challenges. At the moment, I’ve just finished the hero’s ordeal and main crisis which ends Act Two as Christopher Vogler would describe it. Time for Act Three, the road back and the hero’s resurrection.
AI: How has this been a challenge?
LJB: I struggled to differentiate the hero’s crisis from his resurrection. I wrote a high impact ordeal and crisis, if I may say so, which made envisioning the final resurrection difficult. Act Two closes with the hero at his lowest point, captured, tortured, and handed over to a sadistic scientist for experimentation. His friends and allies have been neutralized in several different ways and the antagonist seems ascendant. Yet the hero receives some unexpected help from a surprising source which leads to a direct confrontation with the antagonist and his henchman, whom the hero has sworn to destroy. He must make a choice between satisfying his vengeance and potentially sacrificing himself for the higher cause his friends have embraced. His decision, like all good crises, sets him on a new path and launches the rebel band onto the road back. This was all good stuff but despite a solid plot outline, I just couldn’t see how to play things to the end in a satisfying way.
AI: So how did you resolve this?
LJB: When I get stuck in a book, I often go back to the basics of literary construction, the nuts and bolts of how good stories work. I cracked open Vogler’s book, “The Writer’s Journey” and studied the final movement of the quest story archetype. After rereading this section several times, one thing finally emerged to clarify the issue.
Vogler states that the hero’s crisis is analogous to a college mid-term test and the resurrection is the final exam. This was my “ah-hah” moment. It didn’t take long after that to rethink how the hero would be pursued and what penultimate trial he would face at the story’s climax.
Now all I have to do is sit down and write the darn thing. No rest for the wicked.
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Author Insights with L. J. Bonham
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