The Hero’s Journey

Some say there are only two plots in the world—a stranger comes to town and someone goes on a journey.

My novel’s plot definitely falls into the latter journey category. So I decided to find out a little more about the Hero’s Journey.

I was familiar with Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces concerning the journey of the archetypal hero in world mythologies and that Campbell made famous the term “monomyth.”

Interestingly enough, I learned that Campbell borrowed the term “monomyth” from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
I then found out that Christopher Vogler had distilled Campbell’s ideas into a book titled The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers.

Vogler took Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and broke it down into the following twelve stages:

1. The Ordinary World – The hero is in his or her ordinary surroundings
2. The Call to Adventure – The inciting incident
3. Refusal of the Call – Maybe from fear or some other reason
4. Meeting with the Mentor
5. Crossing the Threshold – Hero leaves the Ordinary World
6. Test, Allies and Enemies – Lots of trials and struggles
7. Approach to Inmost Cave – Preparing for a significant challenge
8. The Ordeal – Hero confronts his greatest fear – Midpoint of the novel
9. The Reward – Seizing the Sword
10. The Road Back – Maybe a few more trials along the way
11. The Resurrection or Atonement – The climax – The hero is transformed
12. Return with Elixir – The hero returns home

During the writing of my first draft, I’m glad I didn’t know about these twelve stages. I think I would’ve felt too hemmed in by this formula, and I would have chafed at feeling the need to hit each mark along the way.

But it’s interesting to note that without even realizing it, I used about half of them. In fact, I think it’s pretty much impossible to avoid the Hero’s Journey entirely. It’s probably ingrained in our psyche from Odysseus onward.

The Hero’s Journey can even be applied to movies. Here’s a fun illustration to show how:

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And lastly, a few books that follow the Hero’s Journey:

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien