Arc of a hero (chihuahua)

My daughter and I decided to make a new picture book based on the pretend-play that she does every day in the car on her way to school.

We made our first (still unpublished) book about a Girl and an Egg in a very unstructured way by sketching up new scenes as the story was progressing over the days, without a particular plan to begin with. It was a fun and pressure free way to make stuff up, but it was a bit challenging to wrap things up into a story that would make sense to anyone besides the two of us and my wife, who was literally playing an active role in all the reenactments.

Not only we had fun making the first book, but we gained some experience, and I wanted to put together some kind of an outline, so that we would have a structure to play within. So before even sketching the main character, I decided to make storyboard for the book.

I also noticed that in our games we might have a beginning of a hero’s journey type of a story, which is described in Joseph Campbell’s seminal book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”. This is structure that has apparently been followed by many of my favourite books and movies from “Star Wars” to the “Wizard of Oz”.

So even though we are still at the blank canvas stage, we are potentially in a good company as far as stories go. Oh, and our main character is a pet chihuahua.