Not getting your story straight: queering heroes’ journeys and heteronormative timelines

Abstract

As with many popular texts promising templates for successful storytelling, The Writer's Journey claims that a singular story structure applies to all voices and circumstances, therefore funnelling every character journey into a 'universal neutral'. This article offers queer temporality as a lens through which to unravel the 12 steps of Vogler's hero's journey, informed by queer theory's critiques of the 8 steps of the heteronormative life journey . It joins other studies critiquing the paradigm from other standpoints, including Indigenous screen storytelling, gaming and interactive narratives, and for development of characters disenfranchised by gender and/or circumstance. Others note the model's increasing irrelevance as writers uncover its limitations for creative processes of story development. This article homes in on how studies of queer temporalities – rejecting 'dominant temporal logics' and 'chrononormativity', replacing 'straight time' with 'queer time', can further destabilise the hero's journey's dominance in story development by exploring the breadth of practices in creative writing and screen production beyond the universalising models.

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