Editing Quest Novels
Authors often struggle to create compelling plots. They try to hit plot points (“turning point” “black moment” and so on) but without a solid sense of how structure works, their stories can feel formulaic and lifeless.
It helps if you understand story patterns so that you can see where the story might be getting off track. One of the most common story patterns is the quest novel. These are the main elements a quest novel needs to have:
- In a quest, the main character (often called the protagonist) seeks something, be it career success, a pot of gold, or someone to love.
- A quest story also needs a place for this quester to go, usually but not always a physical location (New York City, the end of the rainbow, a singles club).
- There is an overt, or obvious, explained, reason to go there (to get a job, dig up the pot of gold, chat up other singles).
- The quester encounters challenges on the way.
- And discovers the real reason to go there (this is inevitably self-knowledge, which is why quest stories are often about coming-of-age).
Huckleberry Finn is a quester; Dante (The Divine Comedy) is a quester; Charles Marlow (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) is a quester.
A reader seeing a quester will expect the story to follow the pattern described above. Now, the author can thwart the reader’s expectations (“Ha! You were expecting to go on a quest. Fooled you!”) but if so, the author must be deliberate about this.
A quester with no quest to go on might answer to the name Don Quixote, but this needs to be a conscious decision, not a failure of craft.
Here let me distinguish between the failure of pattern and the failure of craft. If an author is setting out to critique some aspect of culture, such as occurs in Don Quixote, then having Quixote tilt at windmills is a wonderful illumination of this critique.
The pattern has failed because that’s the whole point of the story: there are no more quests to go on. We have to be delusional in order to go on a quest. This is different from failing to understand what a quest story is, which would be a failure in craft.
As editors, we have to understand the distinction between an intentional failure of the pattern and a failure in craft.
If you’re seeing a connection between “pattern” and “archetype” (a universal representation of human behavior), you’re right! Most stories have a myth-based original with which they intersect. (Remember, literature comes from other literature.)
