Workshop: Challenging the Hero’s Journey: Taking a U-turn from a classic narrative pathway, with Kevin Chong

For decades, the Hero’s Journey story structure, as exemplified in classic literature like Beowulf and Homer’s The Odyssey, and seen more recently in the Star Wars movies and the Harry Potter series, has been taught as the template for successful storytelling. In this workshop, we will look at who is left out when a story focuses on a single protagonist responsible for saving the day, and the stories that don’t follow this model. Using examples from classic and contemporary fiction, and learning from writing exercises, we will look at how passive and collective protagonists and kishōtenketsu (a four-act storytelling structure seen in East Asian narratives) all diverge from the Hero’s Journey.

Kevin Chong is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the novel The Double Life of Benson Yu, which was a finalist for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize and named a Best Book of Canadian Fiction by the CBC. His creative nonfiction and journalism have…