2. Call to Adventure
The call to adventure is the day when everything changes. Some incident requires the hero to change their comfortable yet flawed course. Something happens to take the hero out of her ordinary life and into an adventure. There may be a direct threat to her safety, her family, her way of life, or to the peace of the neighborhood where she lives. It doesn’t have to be a dramatic incident like a war or a death. The Call to Adventure can be an everyday situation and the hero’s response to it disrupts the comfort of her Ordinary World. The Call brings up all the hero’s fears and doubts, presents a challenge, and sometimes causes the hero to go on a quest.
Can you recall a time when some event sent you in a new direction? The Call to Adventure can come in many guises. You get a phone call. The test results come back. You get the promotion. You lose your job. You take a new route home. Something comes in the mail. You say “yes” when you would normally have said “no.”
Let’s take another look at how Doris receives her Call to Adventure:
“Just when she questioned why she’d ever been born a fairy at all, she became the most important fairy who ever lived. Fairies used to fly in and out of their own lairs, very proud of how they decorated them with their own sense of style. It was all the rage to have the most up-to-date artwork on the walls of their lairs and the most efficient kitchen appliances in their tiny kitchens.
They spent most of their days playing jokes on the animals living in the woods like the white-tail deer, coyotes, red foxes, red squirrels, porcupines, and even beavers. Because that’s what fairies do, they lift spirits through their folly. When they got their fill of belly laughs, they swiftly flew home to their own lairs.
In an odd twist of fate, Doris opened her door one day after baking her favorite honey cakes, and every fairy in the land flew inside her house.
“Goodness! What on earth is going on!” Doris exclaimed. She thought they might be playing a joke on her.”
One day Doris’s doorbell rang, and she opened her door. That was her call to adventure. Can you imagine something so mundane changing a life? Lots of movies work this way. Especially romantic comedies. In movies, they talk about the “meet cute,” a mundane moment where the romantic leads meet. In The Holiday, the character played by Kate Winslet meets her romantic interest played by Jack Black when he rings her doorbell and she doesn’t know how the technology works to answer it.
Has a mundane moment changed your comfortable life? Did you ever literally open your door and discover someone bringing you life-changing news? Did you respond or react? Doris responded by opening the door and listening to what the fairies had to say. Take some time to write down the moment you received your Call to Adventure and describe whether it caused you to go on a quest.
This is Part 2 of a 12 part series.
Be sure to read Part 1, if you missed it!
