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How to Be Happier and Mentally Stronger: Learn to See Your Life Like a Hollywood Blockbuster
My husband happens to be a screenwriter, so over the years, I’ve learned a lot about how the sausage gets made when it comes to plotting and structuring movies. There are, I’ve discovered, a whole host of different storytelling frameworks that screenwriters rely on to build propulsive stories that hook audiences.
There is the classic three-act structure you might have learned back in high school, the eight-sequence approach, a variety of different beat sheets, and perhaps the granddaddy of them all, “the hero’s journey.”
Developed by mythologist Joseph Campbell back in 1949, the hero’s journey describes the action not only in famous blockbusters like Star Wars and Harry Potter movies, but also in some of humanity’s oldest tales, like The Odyssey. All of which is fascinating if you happen to be a movie buff or storyteller (spoiler: we’re all storytellers). But why am I talking about screenwriting advice in a general interest article?
Your life is a story.
To understand the answer to that question, you need to first accept that humans are storytelling animals. Stories are how we make sense of the world, attempt to predict the future, and tame the past. This means we not only continuously tell stories…
