Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey is a story structure that every writer out there should be familiar with. From my perspective, it's the single most important source of where all of the other story/novel structures come from, and if you're a serious writer, you'll want to read it front to back at least once. Every other modern structure is derived, in my opinion, from Campbell's seminal work.

The Hero's Journey Can Begin Anywhere. But it Must Begin if We're to Have a Story.

Structure. It’s a simple word, but it’s not that simple a concept when it comes to your novel. Most of us probably don’t even think about the structure of our novel when we begin, especially if we’re new to the game and don’t even know that different structures exist. We start writing, or we start plotting, creating an outline that’ll guide us for the entirety of our book. We have a character in mind, and a story, and maybe we’re already thinking in grandiose terms and have a title we imagine on a billboard over the Sunset Strip because George Clooney’s making a movie after buying option rights. Before we’re hobnobbing with Brad Pitt and Tom Hardy at Cannes, however, we should get back to the basics. If you’re a serious writer, you should know Joseph Campbell’s concept of the monomyth, which is a story structure recurrent in mythology across the world. The Hero’s Journey (or Hero’s Quest), which comes from Campbell’s book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, published in 1949, has seventeen “steps” or stages in a story that, in my opinion, exist in all story structures, in one form or another.

As an undergraduate and then a graduate student in English and an MFA student in Creative Writing, I heard Joseph Campbell’s name often. Every student of literature learns about the Hero’s Journey first, I think, and then later, once we get to the point where we become “serious” writers, we learn about the other six story structures, i.e., Freytag’s Pyramid, Dan Harmon’s Story Circle, the Fichtean Curve, the Seven-Point story structure, the Three Act structure, and the late Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat Beat Sheet structure (Snyder was a Hollywood screenwriter).

The Seventeen Steps of Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey Modified to Twelve Steps.

Now, we could spend all day going over every version of the Hero’s Journey, but this is the seventeen-stage version of Campbell’s monomyth, based on the three main categories of Departure, Initiation, and Return. In Campbell’s book, he describes the narrative pattern as “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

If you’re a writer, that sounds very much like the elevator pitch for a book. If you’ve educated yourself on the six other novel/story structures, there’s obviously a pattern or standard/shared stages between all of them. I take that as versions of the same thing, told differently. In 2007, screenwriter Christopher Vogler came up with a twelve-step framework, which has become quite popular. But again, all the newer/shorter step versions stem from Campbell’s book (which itself was based on earlier influences, including Carl Jung, anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, Johann Georg von Hahn, and plenty of others before them. So, let’s dive into Campbell’s seventeen steps of the Hero’s Journey.

Departure

1.     Call to Adventure

2.     Refusal of the Call

3.     Supernatural Aid

4.     Crossing the First Threshold

5.     In the Belly of the Whale

Initiation

1.     The Road of Trials

2.     The Meeting with the Goddess

3.     Woman As the Temptress

4.     The Atonement of the Father

5.     Apotheosis

6.     The Ultimate Boon

Return

1.     Refusal to Return

2.     The Magic Flight

3.     The Rescue From Without

4.     Crossing the Return Threshold

5.     Master of Two Worlds

6.     Freedom to Live

Now that we know the stages, let’s define what each stage means.

Departure

1.     The Call to Adventure is where our hero begins her journey. Everything’s normal, until it isn’t. Something drives our hero to follow a path somewhere—it doesn’t matter where. Could be a mountain, an island, a city, but it is where our hero goes after receiving some sort of information.

2.     The Refusal of the Call is our hero hesitating or flat out refusing to participate. There may be valid reasons for that refusal—some obligation to family/friends/community/whatever. Perhaps our hero doesn’t believe they can be successful once facing whatever it is that “the call” will throw in front of them. But, as we’ll learn, eventually our hero will have no choice but to venture out.

3.     The Supernatural Aid stage is when our hero decides yes, it’s time to head out on her adventure. It doesn’t have to be a conscious decision but head out she goes. During that time, she’ll meet someone (a warrior, a teacher, a parent figure) who’ll help her navigate the path ahead, and likely with some sort of weapon—a weapon that doesn’t necessarily have to be a weapon, per se, but rather a tool of some sort that will help our hero progress forward.

4.     The Crossing of the First Threshold is when our hero has left behind the world she knows and enters one in which the rules she’s accustomed to don’t apply. There’s danger (whatever that may be to our hero), and she faces it head on, for she has no choice now that she’s in this new world. While many of these stages seem antiquated to us modern-day scribes, we can take them as metaphors for our modern-day issues/stories, etc.

5.     In the Belly of the Whale means exactly that. Our hero has pushed her past aside and embraced the reality of her situation, even when that reality is completely out of her control. Our hero is born again, in a sense, and the metamorphosis has begun.

Initiation

1.     The Road of Trials is just that—when our hero must pass a series of “tests” to begin her transformation. She’s helped along by the person she’s met during the Supernatural Aid stage. Another way to look at it is that our hero has obstacles thrown in front of her and she either overcomes them or doesn’t. Either way, she moves forward. Dragons must be slain, and she’ll likely get a peek at the glorious future that awaits her once her ordeal is over.

2.     The Meeting with the Goddess is when our hero receives certain things that’ll help her sometime in the future. It’s a final test our hero must face in order to “win the boon itself.”

3.     Woman as Temptress (yes, Campbell’s monomyth, because of its historical (and patriarchal origins) speaks in male terms, is when our hero faces temptation. Obviously anyone can be tempted, and the term “woman” can be taken as a metaphor for any temptation our hero may be attracted to, be it physical, spiritual, or something else. This temptation may lead our hero to abandon her quest or temporarily stray from it, but she’ll eventually return for one reason or another.

4.     Atonement with the Father/Abyss is when our hero confronts the thing holding the most sway over her life. Think Hamlet confronting Claudius (but it can be anything). This is the middle of our journey—our climax, on Freytag’s Pyramid. It’s also when our hero realizes that the thing they fear the most is also something they can understand. It can be a scary moment for her.

5.     Apotheosis is when our hero’s strength is realized by the adventures she’s gone through. Our hero is ready for whatever’s next. She understands what she has to do.

6.     The Ultimate Boon is it! It’s our hero achieving what she’s set out to achieve. She is victorious and has achieved the goal she’s set out to accomplish.

Return

1.     The Refusal of the Return is just that—our hero, having overcome the obstacles before her, decides not to return to the world she left to pursue her adventure. She has her trophy, but she isn’t interested in bringing it back home.

2.     The Magic Flight is just that; now that our hero has achieved everything she’d set out to achieve and won, rather than returning home, she flees. There are plenty of reasons why this may be, and more than a few examples throughout this history of film and literature—Beowulf returning after defeating Grendel, Luke Skywalker destroying the Death Star and fleeing in his X-wing.  

3.     The Rescue from Without is our hero being dragged back to the old/original world from which she’d set out on her journey. It can be a person or force or whatever that pulls her back in. Think Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz realizing her journey was only a dream. Our hero in this stage loses the control she’d worked so hard to acquire, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

4.     Crossing the Return Threshold is our hero retaining the things she’s learned on her journey. She is home, whether she wants to be there or not, and must reintegrate into her old life, where she has troubles adjusting

5.     Master of the Two Worlds is when our hero has become comfortable having gone between the world of her journey and the world she has returned to. She can compare and contrast between the two worlds, and is thus more at ease given all she’s gone through. She’s empowered, given her acquiring of knowledge, and is more confident in herself having gone through what she’s gone through.

6.     Freedom to Live is our denouement. Our hero has mastered her fate, and so she is “free” to live as she sees fit. She is no longer afraid of the things she may have previously been afraid of. She has conquered her demons. She has been transformed, and she now possesses the wisdom and knowledge she needed to end her journey successfully. She can move between the two worlds, compromising nothing.

While you don’t have to study these or any of the other story structures to write your novel, it doesn’t hurt to know them, because they’re a great reference when it comes to ensuring you’re meeting your readers’ expectations. My recommendation is that you familiarize yourself with the seven different story structures out there.

The author, Cully Perlman, at Rest in Taos, NM

Cully Perlman is author of a novel, The Losses. He’s also a blogger and substantive editor. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com