The Hero’s Journey

The hero’s journey

 

If you’ve read much how-to-write advice in the past forty years, you’ve probably seen much talk of “The Hero’s Journey,” which is supposed to be the fundamental template or structure that lies underneath all great stories. It’s generally attributed to Joseph Campbell…but really, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

For the first half of the twentieth century, scholars of comparative religion like Sir James George Frazier (The Golden Bough) tried to come up with a sort of Unified Field Theory of mythology and religion. For far longer than that, literary scholars from Aristotle (Poetics) to Robert Graves (The White Goddess) had been trying to come up with a Unified Field Theory of drama as expressed in poetry, plays, and fiction. In the late 1950s, the two sides collided in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces, in which he laid out what he called the monomyth, a detailed version of “hero wants something; hero tries to get it and fails; hero tries at last and succeeds; rewards and/or weddings follow.”

“Detailed” isn’t just hyperbole. My copy of The Hero with a Thousand Faces is 391 pages long (not counting the index), and Campbell devotes an entire chapter to each of the seventeen stages that he sees mythological heroes passing through. The general idea started getting traction in the late 1970s, when Star Wars became a huge smash hit, and George Lucas said he’d based its structure on Campbell’s hero’s journey. (That’s when I hunted up my copy of Hero.) Roughly ten years later, a series of interviews with Campbell was broadcast in prime time. A few years after that, Christopher Vogler took Campbell’s monomyth, cut it from seventeen stages to twelve (removing or renaming some of the more specific and annoying stages, like “Woman as Temptress” and “Atonement with the Father”), and applied it to writing fiction in The Writer’s Journey. Ever since, it’s been hard to get away from the idea.

The most common twelve-step version goes something like this:

1) The hero starts in his Ordinary World.

2) He receives a Call to Adventure, which he

3) either is initially reluctant to accept, or else Refuses outright.

4) He Meets a Mentor figure, who gives him advice, which leads to him

5) Crossing the Threshold to the “extra-ordinary world” of his adventures.

6) He faces Tests, Allies, and Enemies until he

7) Approaches the Inmost Cave, sometimes described as the “second threshold,” where he will face his ultimate

8) Ordeal. Having survived this, he gets

9) a Reward, and starts on

10) the Road Back, which is just as tough as getting this far has been. The ordeal was actually the mid-point of the story; the climax is

11) Resurrection or Rebirth, which is also described as the third and last threshold which the hero has to cross to get out of the extraordinary, adventure world and

12) Return with the Elixir (or the election results, or the dragon’s head, or fire, or whatever amazingly good thing the hero is bringing back to share with all the ordinary people in his ordinary world).

The hero’s journey as envisioned by Campbell and Vogler is one of those double-edged tools. On the one hand, it’s a fairly accurate description of the cycle a lot of mythic heroes go through. As such, you can map it quite easily onto the three-act and four-act structures that have been around since Aristotle…or map Aristotle onto the hero’s journey. They’re both describing the same fundamental thing, from different angles, and it’s often exceedingly useful to look at something in a new way. If you’re writing an adventure, and you have the nagging feeling that something is wrong with it, checking in on the various steps of the hero’s journey can give you a way to spot where the problem is.

On the other hand, the hero’s journey template has become so ubiquitous that it’s in danger of becoming its own cliché. It doesn’t take into consideration any of the changes a writer can ring on narrative structure and form, and while it has enough flexibility to adapt in a lot of ways, the writer has to be aware of the need to adapt it, which a lot of the folks pushing this structure don’t seem to think of.

The hero’s journey, as presented to writers, doesn’t explicitly allow for a spiraling story, in which the protagonist returns “home” several times, each time seeing it differently, or for the stories in which the protagonist never returns to their original home at all, but has to create a new normal somewhere else, or is condemned to wander on, perhaps forever. Again, the form can be adapted, but only if one is aware that it isn’t the rigidly-and-universally-applicable structure that many of its proponents seem to think it is.

The other problem is that the structure is very much a hero’s journey. Attempts at coming up with a heroine’s version have not been terribly successful so far, in my opinion – at least, none of the alternatives that have been proposed have caught on the way the Campbell-Vogler version has.

Most of all, though, the hero’s journey was conceived as a way of analyzing already existing works. It doesn’t – and it can’t – say anything about how those works were hammered into that shape in the first place, and it most certainly doesn’t have anything to do with how their writers went about writing them. Of the professional writers I know well, exactly zero start with the hero’s journey as a conscious and deliberate plot pattern, and I think only two (maybe only one) have ever used it during the revising/polishing process to find and plug plot holes. Writing fiction is almost never as logical and systematic as after-the-fact analysis makes it look.

 

On February 7, 2018   /   Writing  

Tags: basic writing, plot