Crafting Compelling Adventures: A Guide to Writing an Adventure Story

The adventure genre centres on a quest for discovery into the unknown, often in distant lands, dangerous terrain, or alternate times.

Narrative Focus

The protagonist and other characters often seek a highly desirable and elusive goal, such as a valuable treasure or elixir. Despite encountering numerous challenges and obstacles, they persist in their pursuit. The narrative focuses on the protagonist’s decisions and capabilities as they navigate obstacles in their quest for the ultimate prize. These challenges might include mythical creatures, physical and mental obstacles, combat, and pursuit, which serve as a way for the characters to develop and mature, with themes of personal growth and self-discovery often prominent. The journey tests the characters on all levels, pushing them to demonstrate qualities such as bravery, resilience, courage, wit, strength, physical ability, and resourcefulness.

Adventure and Action-Adventure

Adventure is commonly combined with the action genre to make action-adventure. These stories explore themes around physical and internal courage as characters face life-or-death struggles. The protagonist belongs to a world and community but is often an underdog with self-doubt, and has an internal conflict that they must overcome. They have skills and potential that make them uniquely suited to challenge the antagonist, who represents death and chaos.

Protagonist's Journey

Despite their doubts, the protagonist initially hesitates to face the challenge because the danger is lethal and the antagonist appears unbeatable. However, something beyond their skills ultimately motivates them to take action and the threat of death forces them to leave the familiarity of their world. The protagonist embarks on a perilous journey to unknown and unsettling locations to face daunting challenges, confront the antagonist, and retrieve the elixir. Or the protagonist is thrown into a mysterious underworld as they embark on a quest to reach the antagonist’s lair, which is often situated in an otherworldly location. Alternatively, if the antagonist invades the protagonist’s ordinary world, they turn its familiar surroundings into a realm of chaos, destruction, and otherworldly terror. The antagonist not only possesses immense power but also the drive to harm and destroy everything the protagonist holds dear. The antagonist’s power stems from larger, impersonal forces that threaten the protagonist and their community’s existence.

Role of Technology

The trope of technology being both crucial and unreliable often plays a central role in action-adventure. This is demonstrated through the chaos caused by malfunctioning machinery and the protagonist’s use of technology in innovative and unexpected ways. The protagonist often alternates between relying on technology and opting for more authentic forms of action. This is closely associated with the dependence on machinery that defines modernity.