Many science communication texts direct students towards the Hero’s Journey, based on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. This is irresponsible at best and outright harmful at worst.
Campbell’s work was not based on any serious scholarship and was deeply rooted in his personal context as a man in the United States in the mid-20th century.
Variations on the Hero’s Journey have been used to great effect in Hollywood productions. Star Wars in particular was quite explicitly structured using the Hero’s Journey.
Except Star Wars was written for a predominantly male audience in the United States in the 20th century.
Search outside the United States and you’ll find places where Hero’s Journey narratives are quite rare. Like Japan, where one of the more common narrative structures is Kishōtenketsu, which translates to Introduction-Development-Twist-Conclusion.
Kishōtenketsu focuses on the relationship between characters and their context, as opposed to the Hero’s Journey and the Three Act Structure (another structure frequently recommended to science communication students), which focus on how characters confront conflicts.
Kishōtenketsu, Hero’s Journey and Three Act narratives all have characters who experience conflict within some context, but they differ in which of those elements they prioritise.
Not every message can be communicated by telling a story about a character confronting a conflict. Consider anthropogenic climate change: while it threatens immense conflict, it is more sensible to talk about it in terms of our relationship with our context, where we are the characters in the story.
Well, it makes more sense if our purpose is to convince people to change how they interact with the environment.
But if we wanted to build support for a protest against a new coal fired power plant, then framing our message as a conflict within our context could be more useful, where the context is the environment and the conflict is the harm the power plant will inflict on it.
Unless our audience are business executives, then we’re more likely to want to tell a story about how much cheaper it is to generate energy from renewables than from fossil fuels. That’s a story about a changing context (innovations in renewables) that triggers conflict (a race to invest) between characters (executives).
So don’t try to force your work into a prescribed narrative structure. Instead, start by considering what you want to say (message), why you’re saying it (purpose) and who you’re saying it to (audience). Then look for character, conflict and context and decide which you need to prioritise to tell the right story for this audience at this moment.
Keelan is a science communicator and an author of science fiction and fantasy. He has a background in physics, creative writing, literary theory, and science communication. Keelan enjoys bringing science to art and art to science and thrives in the beautiful chaos that always ensues when the two fields mix.
All opinions on this website are representative of individuals and are not representative of The University of Western Australia. The University of Western Australia is not liable for content herein.
