Podcasts › Fiction Writing Made Easy with Savannah Gilbo
#254. How to Outline Your Novel With the Hero’s Journey
What's in this episode
Learn how to outline your novel using the Hero’s Journey—without mistaking this classic framework for a complete story blueprint. The Hero’s Journey is one of the most widely recognized story frameworks out there. But knowing the twelve stages—like the Ordinary World, the Call to Adventure, the Ordeal, and the Return with the Elixir—isn’t the same as knowing where those stages belong in a full-length novel. In this episode, I’m walking you through how to outline your novel with the Hero’s Journey framework, including how to divide your word count into acts, break those acts into scenes, and map the twelve stages across a novel-length manuscript. You’ll also learn what the Hero’s Journey can and can’t do on its own—because while it’s a powerful way to track your protagonist’s external adventure and internal transformation, it’s not a substitute for developing your genre, premise, character, conflict, theme, and stakes. You'll hear me talk about things like: [02:40] What the Hero’s Journey is and how to use its three acts and twelve stages as a tool for outlining a novel [05:15] How to split your word count across the three acts (and the percentage breakdown that tells you how long e