Somewhere in your writing education—maybe in a workshop, maybe in a book, maybe just scrolling through writing Twitter at three in the morning—you learned about the Hero’s Journey. The Call to Adventure. The Crossing of the Threshold. The Meeting with the Mentor. The Ordeal. The Reward. The Road Back. It’s become the template for every story worth telling, right?

Except when it isn’t. Except when it becomes a straightjacket that strangles the life out of your book before you even finish writing it.

Listen, Joseph Campbell did incredible work mapping narrative patterns. Understanding the Hero’s Journey teaches you something real about how stories breathe. But using it as a checklist? That’s how you end up with a book that hits every beat but feels like it’s reading from a script.

The conundrum is this: how do you honor the deep structures that make stories resonate while telling a story that actually surprises you, your readers, and maybe the world?

Amira was stuck on her novel about a woman rebuilding her life after loss. According to the Hero’s Journey, her protagonist should have a mentor, a clear enemy, a moment of absolute darkness before the triumph. But Amira’s story wasn’t like that. Her protagonist’s enemy wasn’t a person or a monster—it was apathy, the quiet voice that said “why bother?” Her mentor wasn’t a wise old figure but a messy friendship that developed messily. Her ordeal wasn’t one climactic moment but a thousand small moments of choosing to show up.

She was drowning trying to force her story into Campbell’s template. Then she stopped thinking of the Hero’s Journey as a formula and started thinking of it as a language. The language of transformation.

Every story transforms something. Maybe it transforms a character. Maybe it transforms a world. Maybe it transforms the reader. The Hero’s Journey is one way to map that transformation. But it’s not the only way.

Some of the best contemporary fiction doesn’t follow Campbell’s structure at all. It follows the rhythm of real life—circular, messy, imperfect. The protagonist doesn’t get a clear call to adventure because real people don’t usually get clear calls. They get whispers. Doubts. Small moments that accumulate into something undeniable.

The way to break free from formulaic storytelling isn’t to ignore structure. It’s to understand structure so deeply that you can bend it without breaking it. Read Campbell. Understand the patterns. Then ask yourself: what does my story actually need? Not what does the template demand, but what does the truth of this story require?

That’s when the conundrum dissolves. When you’re writing a story that honors both tradition and your own vision. That’s when the formula becomes invisible because it’s been transformed into something all your own.