The assignment: provide a narrative flow to your blog post. Nervous, I looked around the room at the other participants. How am I supposed to do that? I asked myself.

It was my first meeting of the Breakfast Blogging Club, and Beth Barany was facilitating. As a fiction writer, I’m very comfortable with narrative elements, but Beth urged us to use a traditional (though truncated) hero’s journey for our blog writing.

You’ve probably heard this stuff before—inciting incident, call to action, black moment, strong resolution. But this was nonfiction we were talking about, right? How exactly do you do that in a blog post? I sweated a bit during the timed writing, but fortunately, we didn’t read our work to the group. Phew! Still, I was glad I went–my second ever meetup meeting.

Then a week later, I came across this blog by Kristen Lamb. To my surprise, she captured the lesson with ease (though obviously she had not been in attendance). Or maybe she was that mysterious fly on the wall? Read her post here and see if you can find the hero’s journey embedded in “Lessons from Oleander.”

Excellent post, Kristen, and good writing advice whether we are penning the Great American Novel or the great (we hope) high school term paper or our next blog post.

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