Brief definition: A hero or heroine goes on an adventure, is victorious, and is transformed.
This can be fiction or memoir.
Examples: Dorothy in Wizard of Oz
Kerrin in Amoran, recently published by Debra Koehler
If you were to write a story of your life, or a real person’s life, or your fictional character life as a hero’s or heroine’s journey, what would the lowlights be?
The highlights?
What obstacle did you or your character overcome?
Write a scene where there is a conflict: Someone wants something. There is an obstacle.
Does the character get what they want?
Prompt #861
Write a scene involving a conflict or overcoming an obstacle.
“As a writer, it can be difficult to find a clear path that leads you to your goals.” “One of my biggest concerns is that someone has a vision for what they want to write and create, and they justify giving it up. That it’s too hard to publish, so they don’t. That they receive too many rejections, so they give up. That they read marketing is impossible nowadays, so they stop trying.” You don’t have to struggle alone. Dan Blank has answers. “We struggle alone. We succeed together.”The Creative Shift by Dan Blank, November 7, 2025
I have re-read a Wall Street Journal article numerous times since its publication, July 2024, partly because of the subject, mostly because of the riveting way it was written . . . the account of the days before and after Rachel Zimmerman’s husband’s death by his own hand.
“As a health reporter, I wrote years ago about a study that showed the psychological benefits of storytelling. I was fascinated by research that found that people felt differently about themselves and their lives when they reframed their stories so that they were agents, not victims or bystanders. Essentially, the story matters less than how we tell it to ourselves.” Rachel Zimmerman, “A Decade Ago, My Husband Killed Himself. Could I Have Stopped it?” The Wall Street Journal, July 6-7, 2024
As Zimmerman wrote, “This is my effort to make sense of something senseless.”
Both Zimmerman and Samantha Rose (Giving Up The Ghost) wrote about extremely difficult subjects with an eloquence that makes their writing and their stories memorable.
The trick to writing about hard topics is to practice self-care while writing.
“If we write about our pain, we heal gradually, instead of feeling powerless and confused, and we move to a position of wisdom and power.” — Louise DeSalvo, Writing as a Way of Healing
“As writers, we’re often trained to seek momentum—significant events, turning moments, the big emotional payoff. Especially in memoir, there’s pressure to magnify the trauma or spin a grand arc of triumph. But when I sat down to write, what called to me weren’t the headlines. It was the folds in between.” — Mary Monoky, “What Stillness Taught Me About Story,” August 6, 2025, The Brevity Blog
