The best stories show the hero changing. The more drastic the change, the more emotional the experience. A hero who changes from a loser to a winner (think “Rocky”) is far more interesting than a hero who changes from a winner to a bigger winner.
Eliminate change in the hero and you literally don’t have a story. The key is to make your hero change and tell a compelling story in the process.
The four stages of the hero’s change look like this:
Act I – Hero’s problem introduced.
Act IIa – Hero succeeds but fails to resolve their initial problem.
Act IIb – Hero forced to confront their problem.
Act III – Hero resolves their problem.
This is how the four stages of the hero’s change works in “Little Miss Sunshine”:
Act I – Olive, a little girl, lives in a dysfunctional family where all the family members have problems and many don’t get along with each other. Watch this scene from “Little Miss Sunshine” that introduces the problems with the entire family.
Act IIa – The family agrees to drive Olive to a beauty pageant so they’re forced together and (mostly) get along.
Act IIb – Each family member’s life starts falling apart until Dwayne, Olive’s brother, openly tells everyone they’re all losers. This forces them to face their problem.
Act III – By competing on stage, Olive helps bring her entire family together to support her and indirectly each other. By the end, all family members have resolved their differences with each other and are largely happy together.
This is how the four stages of the hero’s change works in “Twisters”:
Act I – Kate, a bright storm chaser, tries to test her theory on killing a tornado but it fails and she loses three friends in the process. Watch this scene from “Twisters” here.
Act IIa – Kate is enticed back into storm chasing but she still feels guilty over the failure of her theory that killed three of her friends.
Act IIb – A major tornado wipes out a rodeo and forces Kate to re-examine her theories to see how she could change it to save people from the next killer tornado.
Act III -When a tornado threatens to wipe out a town and kill her friends, Kate drives towards the tornado herself to test her new theory, which succeeds in killing the tornado and saving the town and her friends.
By just outlining the four stages of your hero’s change, you can create the basic structure for your entire story. If you fail to outline your hero’s change, you risk writing scenes that fail to change your hero in any significant way, creating an emotionally empty story.
So make sure your hero changes and create a rough four-step outline that shows how your hero changes over time. You’ll be surprised at how this simple outlining trick can help you define your entire story quickly and easily.
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