Hero's Journey, 3 Act Structure, and Word Counts · 6:34pm Nov 7th, 2014
I've been working on a table of word counts for the various steps of The Hero's Journey across the standard 3 Act Structure.
The green rows show the word counts of the entire stories. (50,000/20,000/3,000/100/etc)
The yellow rows show the word counts per act per story. (25% of total for Act 1, 50% for Act 2, 25% for Act 3)
The first of each of the two columns under the Act word counts show the number of words for that step in The Hero’s Journey.
(5% of the total for each step of the Hero's Journey in Act 1, 12.5% for each step in Act 2, and 8.33% for each step in Act 3)
The second column shows the number of words you should have total when you finish that section.
These are only guidelines.
I hope it helps with your story writing.
Here's a really great overview of the steps of the Hero's Journey.
The original links to thewritersjourney.com/hero's_journey.htm seem to have been down for a while, so I've linked to an archive.org version of the page. Hope it returns soon!
Thank you for posting this. I shall go through this blog more times to come.
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You're very welcome. :) I hope it helps. :)
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I created a web based calculator that you can enter any word count goal into and get a nice little table of word count mini-goals.
It's over here if you're interested.
2610672 This is so brilliant! Thanks so much!^^
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Glad you find it useful. :) I updated the Hero's-Journey/3-Act-Structure calculator so you can uncheck parts of the Hero's Journey you don't think fit yours story. Hope you enjoy. Let me know if you find any bugs.