memoir

The hero’s journey: How it helped me find my story

Dianeby Diane
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Last time I updated you on progress writing my first book, I’d recently broken up with my writing coach. The upside of the experience – I emerged with a first draft of my book. The downside – it wasn’t good.

How did I know it wasn’t good? Well, I’d set out to write a memoir – a story of personal transformation – that spanned the years I’d worked as a tour guide in the Polar regions. While my first draft was packed with penguins and polar bears, there wasn’t a hint of personal transformation to be found.

I knew that at the heart of my unique journey was a universal story that others would relate to. I just didn’t know what it was. When I went searching for tools to help me find it, I discovered the hero’s journey.

The hero’s journey is a classic storytelling template first characterised by literature professor Joseph Campbell. It involves a hero who goes on an adventure, faces challenges, learns lessons, fulfills a quest and returns home transformed. Its basic structure looks like this:

Act 1: The hero’s ordinary life is disrupted by a call for adventure.

Act 2: The hero enters an extraordinary world where they must overcome challenges during an epic journey.

Act 3: The hero returns home triumphant.

If you look closely, you’ll find the hero’s journey everywhere – in ancient myths, films, TV series and novels. You’ll find it in memoir too. Because memoir is all about transformation. Whether it’s about healing from trauma, getting sober or winning Olympic gold, the protagonist of a good memoir must grow and transcend before they can triumph.

I was immediately hooked. I wanted my story to follow the same narrative arc. I mean, it already did. I literally left home on an adventure. I physically went on an epic journey for 12 years to some extraordinary places. And I returned home feeling quietly triumphant – like I’d figured out some pretty important things.

Curious to find out more, I took some writing classes that delved deeper into the hero’s journey. Then I began matching my story up with its many stages.

At the beginning, the hero is living in the ‘ordinary world’. Picture me at 24 – an enthusiastic and ambitious recent university graduate working in my first professional job.

Next, the hero receives a call to adventure. Picture me again, this time realising I don’t like my job and secretly wishing I could quit and go travel.

I didn’t though. I stayed in Australia and tried to fix things. I changed roles, moved apartments and started new hobbies. According to the hero’s journey, this is called the ‘refusal of the call’. The hero isn’t sure they should answer the call, so they sit tight.

Then a mentor figure comes along, gives the hero some counsel and convinces them to follow the call. In my case, there was no mentor. I just really didn’t like my job and I really wanted to travel. So I quit and left the country. End of Act 1.

So far so good.

In Act 2, the hero enters the ‘extraordinary world’ where they face a series of tasks and challenges that initiate their transformation. Naturally, they fail one or more of these tasks and it looks like they’ll never succeed. But then they meet allies, score some wins and things start looking up. Then there’s a big moment in the middle – the mid-point crisis – when the hero confronts the reason for their journey. This is a major turning point: every prior step has brought the hero here, and every step forward stems from this moment.

Act 2 is where I run into trouble with the hero’s journey. Because in some ways my story follows the template and in other ways it doesn’t.

I was certainty on a quest to find a new career. But I didn’t launch a single-minded mission – hero’s journey style – to find it. Not at the beginning, anyway. I remember thinking: “I have time to live a little”. So I sought out experiences that sounded fun and interesting, like working as a tour guide in Antarctica.

Becoming an Antarctic tour guide did feel like a hero’s journey though. Because when I started, I couldn’t tell the difference between an Adelie penguin and a Gentoo penguin. I’d never led a hike or driven a boat. I had to learn all of this on the job, in front of my teammates and 100 paying guests. For someone like me – who holds themselves to an impossibly high standard and doesn’t like screwing up or not having the right answer – this was a daunting task. I did it anyway and the results were embarrassing, amusing, fun, amazing and, well, transformative.

I had a mid-point crisis too. It came about three years into my journey. I remember thinking: “Time’s up!” I’d had my fun and now it was time to decide where to live and what career to pursue. I made a list of options and put an immense amount of pressure on myself to choose one even though I knew in my heart of hearts I wanted to keep travelling and guiding. It was then – three years shy of 30 and looking anxiously at the clock – that I became aware of my inner conflict. It was then that I realised I had a choice: I could live according to someone else’s definition of success or I could go find my own. This was huge – the major turning point in my story. And it’s definitely a hero’s journey kind of moment.

I tried, repeatedly, to write this story.

I plotted it all onto one narrative arc using the hero’s journey as my guide. But I kept running into trouble. My plot points didn’t seem to match up. I’d write a new outline and start a new draft only to get stuck again. The biggest problem – my becoming-an-Antarctic-tour-guide story didn’t line up with my big turning point. It was like they belonged to different stories. Something just didn’t add up.

I began to wonder if the problem was the hero’s journey template. Maybe it was too restrictive. Maybe I was trying too hard to make my life fit into the hero’s neat, linear path. Real life is messy and complicated. Maybe I needed to let my book be messy and complicated too.

So, I made the call. I finally decided to part ways with the hero’s journey – to thank it for all it had done for me and let it go. I sat down at my laptop and wrote this blog post. After declaring my decision, I wrote a conclusion and put the blog post aside. I’d come back to it after the weekend and edit it with fresh eyes.

But then something happened on the weekend.

I was at the gym, running on the treadmill and trying to empty my mind. Instead I began pondering my next move now that I’d ditched the hero’s journey.

It’s funny how aha moments work. You can study a problem a million times in a million different ways and not find the answer. And then it seems to come out of nowhere, the same way mine popped up while I was running on that treadmill.

My story isn’t a hero’s journey.

It’s two hero’s journeys.

One is a young woman’s journey to find a meaningful and fulfilling career. The other is the journey of a rookie Polar guide who’s determined to be a pro.

One is about redefining success. The other is about redefining failure.

They run in parallel, inform each other and sometimes intersect. But they each have their own challenges, turning points and triumphs. Because they’re two separate stories.

So it looks like I’m not parting ways with the hero’s journey just yet. It seems it wasn’t the tool that was the problem but the apprentice who’s still figuring out how to use it.

And now that apprentice has to go figure out how to write two stories and then weave them into one.

It’s bound to be a transformative experience.

My latest mistake and what I learned from it

Dianeby Diane
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Earlier this year, I decided to hire a writing coach.

My decision came after a year of working on my book alone. A year of filling notebooks with scenes and anecdotes. Of making no real progress. I was tired of trying to figure it all out on my own, so I went looking for someone who could help me get a manuscript written.

After some Googling and asking around, I found a coach who seemed like the right fit. She was friendly, engaging and professional – a twenty-year veteran of the publishing industry with a string of published clients who say she’s amazing. After an initial consultation, I got a good feeling. I signed up to work with her for two months.

Things started well.

First, she told me to draw up a book structure. I did, and it got a big thumbs up. Then I wrote my first two chapters and sent them to her for review. I anxiously waited for her feedback, not sure if what I’d written was any good. I needn’t have been worried.

‘Your story is compelling and well told,’ she replied. I relaxed, overcome with relief. I got straight back to writing, producing a mind-boggling two chapters, or 10,000 words, per week. Her positive reviews kept coming, peppered with some minor queries and suggestions.

‘This is a solid draft,’ my coach told me about a third of the way in. She assured me that my manuscript would require only one round of minor revisions before it was ready for publication.

I was thrilled. After a year of doodling in notebooks I was finally making progress. When we hit the halfway mark, and my coach asked if I wanted to keep going, I gave her a big thumbs up. I could see the finish line now and I didn’t want to stop.

Which may explain why I ignored a few red flags.

The main one concerned my story, which was turning out to be more of a travelogue than a memoir – a chronological account of what I did and saw with no real storyline. I began to wonder if perhaps I hadn’t thought this book structure through enough. When I raised my concerns with my writing coach, she told me not to worry.

‘Your book can be both a travelogue and a memoir’, she told me. According to her, all I had to do was insert a few pages here and there telling the reader how I was feeling, and I’d have myself a memoir.

I wasn’t entirely convinced. But after a year of working on my own and getting nowhere, I figured I should keep an open mind. Did I also mention how thrilled I was to see the finish line?

The closer I got to the end, the more wildly those red flags began flapping in my face. My story had no narrative arc. No character development. No tension to resolve. No ah-ha moment to get my readers fist-pumping into the air. I started wondering what I’d paid my writing coach thousands of dollars for.

When I finished the draft, I sent it to a friend to read, just to be sure I wasn’t being too self-critical. When her feedback arrived, my heart sank. ‘Sorry to sound harsh,’ she wrote. ‘I’m only reading this because you’re a dear friend.’

Things didn’t end well with my writing coach.

She was fine when I told her I was cutting our time short because I needed to go find someone else to help me get a handle on my book. She wasn’t so fine when I asked for a partial refund. All of a sudden her tone changed from ‘I just want you to be satisfied’ to ‘I fulfilled the terms of the contract.’

For a while I felt terrible – mad at myself for wasting money, upset at how our relationship had ended, and disheartened by the thought of starting my book again from scratch. I took some time off to lick my wounds and come up with a new plan.

I also reflected on what had happened and what I’d learned from the experience. Some of the lessons were so obvious I kicked myself for not realising them sooner.

For a start, I should have chosen a writing coach who specialises in memoir.

When I’d asked my writing coach about her experience with memoir, she told me she’d worked on several ‘memoir-like’ books. I realise now that that wasn’t good enough. I should have chosen someone who knows the genre inside out.

Before I agreed to work with her, I should have read her clients’ books. Instead of just taking her word for it (and theirs too) I should have checked out their final products and judged for myself.

And I should have chosen a coach who publishes with major publishing companies and whose clients do too. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve read some good self-published books. But most self-published books out there wouldn’t make it past a publishing company’s slush pile. Which possibly explains why my coach, whose clients mostly self-publish, let me get away with mediocre.

A few months after the bust up, I enrolled in a writing class – an introduction to memoir with a teacher who satisfied all of my new criteria. It was time to go back to basics, I decided. To stop trying to rush to the finish line. To slow down and learn my craft.

This time, I wasn’t disappointed. I found a teacher who challenges her students to see past the particularities of their lives; to tell a universal story that others will want to read. I’ll write more about that in a future post.

By no means was my first coaching experience a complete waste of time and money. Like most relationships that go sour, there were good bits too.

I’d wanted someone to help me get a manuscript written and that’s precisely what I got. I have a first draft, which is a start. Finally, a score on the board.

Even though I won’t use much of it, my first draft is far from useless. Sometimes you have to try the things that don’t work to find the things that do. I gained a whole lot of clarity and it will show in the second draft.

I came out of this experience with a strong sense of certainty too. After I picked myself up and dusted myself off, I asked myself a question.

Do I want to keep doing this? Do I want to keep writing a book that has already taken longer than I expected it to and may take years more?

The answer came easily.

Yes.

Why I’m Writing a Memoir

Dianeby Diane
•

I didn’t plan to write a memoir.

When I first decided to write a book – to submit to the yearning of my whimsical inner voice – I never dreamed I’d write a personal story. If I was going to do something as indulgent as writing a book, it would have to be scholarly and informative. So, I hatched a brilliant to plan to write a PhD thesis about Antarctica and turn that into a book. I almost pulled it off.

In March 2013, I enrolled in a PhD program at the Australian National University with three fantastic scholars as my mentors. After a few months of reading and pondering, I chose my topic: the history of Antarctic tourism.

Off I went, to research and write my heart out. I collected archival documents, read personal accounts, and interviewed pioneer tour operators. A story began to form. One by one, chapters were written. Four and a bit years later, in May 2017, I submitted my PhD thesis, a 75,000-word manuscript with over 500 footnotes.

Violà! I have the first draft of my book.

Within a month of submission, I’d attracted the interest of a university publisher in the US. All I had to do was turn my thesis into a book and I’d be a published author. I could tick ‘write a book’ off my to-do list.

But something held me back.

While much of my PhD thesis reads like a book, I knew that transforming it from an almost-book to an actual book required more than a minor edit. Sections would need to be removed and new ones added, which would require more work and more academic writing. I wasn’t sure I had it in me. I remember confessing to a friend that I’d be happy if I never wrote another academic word in my life.

Meanwhile, my whimsical inner voice had more to say on the matter. Over the course of four years of documenting and writing other people’s stories, I felt a growing desire to write about my own experiences. I was also encouraged by the interest of others. Whenever I gave a talk on my research, questions would inevitably turn from the academic to the personal.

‘What was it like?’ everyone from university professors to retired farmers would ask me about my travels in Antarctica.

By the time I’d finished my PhD, my plan to turn my thesis into a book was under threat by my longing to write something far more personal – a story straight from the heart about what I’d learned on my voyages to the ends of the earth. But whenever I flirted with the idea of writing a memoir, a flood of resistance followed.

‘Why did I spend all those years doing a PhD?’ I’d ask myself. ‘Am I really going to let all that work go to waste?’

In an attempt to be resourceful, I came up with a new plan. I’d do both. I’d weave my personal experiences into the broader history of Antarctic tourism. It would be a story within a story, each one enriching the other. I’d be granting my inner voice its wish without wasting my thesis. Problem solved!

For months, I sketched up different versions of this two-storied book. First, I tried telling the two stories simultaneously, with alternating chapters. Then I tried a three-part approach, whereby the first part was for history, the second part for my story, and the third part for bringing the two together. No matter what I tried, the stories were weakened rather than strengthening by each other. Finally, I conceded that it wasn’t working. Finally, I let my thesis go.

The resistance didn’t stop there. When I began putting my experiences down on paper, I realised how exposed I felt, writing a full-blown memoir. I hadn’t just been holding onto my thesis for the sake of resourcefulness. I’d been hiding behind it; hunkering in its leeside out of harm’s way.

What was I afraid of?

Making a complete fool of myself for a start. Being called narcissistic, self-indulgent, self-absorbed, lacking self-awareness, annoying. Writing all about myself instead of something more important, like conservation, climate change or gender. Needlessly adding myself to an already saturated market of privileged white woman who travel to exotic places to find themselves. The list of fears goes on.

I’m told all writers struggle with fear. It’s one of the reasons so many people talk about writing a book instead of doing it. It also explains the hordes of writing gurus and their inspirational slogans: Someone needs your story! Action cures fear! Write it anyway! That list goes on too.

The fear never goes away, but nor does the desire to write my story and share it with the world. More specifically, I look forward to these three things:

I savour the thought of holding my book in my hands; tracing my thumb down its spine and flicking playfully through its pages. I’m endlessly curious to find out what my story looks like – how I’ll articulate what I learned and which scenes from my life I’ll choose to show it. And I’m excited for the experiences this book will make possible. The people and opportunities it will bring my way. The new adventures it will spark.

Forging on and finishing this book is also, in a way, the final chapter of my story. If I learned anything on my travels to the ends of the earth, it’s that sometimes you have to let go of your brilliant plan in order to make space for something even better. I planned to write a scholarly book but that whimsical inner voice knew best. And I now know better than to ignore it.

So, I keep going. I write it anyway.

P.S. My PhD thesis is available here.