Episode 3: Outlining Stories with the Hero's Journey

[@archon8519]

Great video, excellent production quality!

[@authorjonathandavidson]

Thank you so much! I’m a filmmaker and a photographer in my day job, so those skills are coming in handy for this project. Thanks for noticing the effort that goes into this.

[@yondus]

Just wanted to say, I appreciate you doing all of this. It’s very helpful to see someone take the lessons and then show how they are applying them, great series 👍👍

[@authorjonathandavidson]

You’re welcome! I’m glad to hear you’re finding it helpful. Thanks for the kind words.

[@MrRosebeing]

I wouldn't if I were you. Someone tried it once and it ended in the death of a Star, or something.

[@ryanpatterson2527]

Looking forward to hearing more

[@authorjonathandavidson]

More episodes are on the way! I'm writing the first two chapters of the novel right now. The next episode should drop in the next two to three weeks.

[@EzeICE]

Another important thing to remember is the motivation of the protagonists as well. In this case, the aliens want to block the sunlight on earth to destroy human life. But why? And if they're advanced aliens, why use such a tactic? Why not just a full-on assault on the humans? What are the alien's looking to gain?

[@authorjonathandavidson]

These are great questions, and I've been asking them myself as I put this story together. My current answer is that, if aliens are advanced enough to travel through space, they may have also advanced in other areas. What if they are masters of bioengineering and emotional intelligence? What are the implications of that combination? Here's my current logic process for extrapolating these ideas: 1. Because the aliens are good at bioengineering, they've reached the point where they can regenerate themselves, effectively becoming immortal unless tragedy strikes. 2. Because they're high in emotional intelligence, they value themselves and each other. Their long lifespans lead to relationships that last thousands of years or more and they become closely bonded with the entire species. The loss of any individual is devastating and creates long-lasting emotional trauma. This also extends to other species-they're able to empathize with intelligent life, and to kill other beings, especially up close and personal, is scarring. 3. This leads to a major problem for the aliens when they discover Earth. The aliens need a new planet or their species will perish, but the Earth is crawling with billions of highly intelligent beings. The aliens are smart enough to realize that humans won't share the Earth and its limited resources with an alien civilization without bloodshed, which would mean losing who knows how many of their own. And because humans get into frequent wars, the aliens decide that they can never trust humans to peacefully coexist even if they somehow welcomed the aliens. 4. But getting into a war with the humans is almost unthinkable. Murdering billions of intelligent beings would be excruciating, and they'd lose many of their own, which is far worse. After much consideration, the aliens decide that they will destroy life on earth from a distance to minimize the risk to themselves and to reduce the emotional impact of the massacre, and then rebuild it. That's why they raid the Svalbard Seed Vault and other repositories of biological information-they're backing up Earth's ecosystem. 5. The aliens decide on a two-fold strategy to cleans the Earth of humans. The first is to distract the humans enough so that they won't be able to mount a counterattack in time. They do this by creating manifestations of religious figures over holy sites around the world, which tell their follower that the end is near, and that each group must cleanse the world of wickedness. As you can imagine, this causes all kinds of problems. Around the same time, they start to spin up the discs and block Earth's sunlight. 6. In this way, the aliens hope to stay far removed as the humans destroy themselves and slowly freeze to death. Freezing the Earth has a secondary benefit-the preservation of a lot of biological material that can be used to breathe life back onto the planet. So yeah, I basically came up with all that to justify giant space discs, because they sound awesome.

[@EzeICE]

@@authorjonathandavidson And perhaps these aliens studied human life and figured out how to manipulate their religious idols and leaders in order to control them. And also figured that their Sun gives the essential life-force for the planet. That's very interesting and perhaps that's something that Kelsey discovers in also studying these aliens as well.

[@leclue22]

The Hero’s Journey would be more interesting if Joseph Campbell hadn’t tried to use every three-plus syllable word in the thesaurus. It’s odd that Campbell was a long time friend of John Steinbeck who has one of the easiest to read writing styles in modern literature.