Recently, I finished the first draft of my third book. It takes time to distance yourself from a manuscript before you can objectively edit it, so I picked up a project that had been working on for some time. The idea behind the project is to create a high-level story blueprint to see if a story idea or concept is worth taking further.  The blueprint brings together some of the ideas of my favourite movie industry gurus, such as Michael Hauge, Syd Field, Blake Snyder, Chris Soth and Paul Gulino into one simple document.

While working on the project I wondered how I might also incorporate some of the ideas of Christopher Vogler. I had researched Vogler’s writings and presentations on the internet and thought I understood the hero’s journey. But there is nothing quite like reading the original material first hand; so I bought ‘The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers’. I’m so pleased I did.

‘The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers’ draws on the psychology of Carl G Jung and the studies of Joseph Campbell to set out the hero’s journey under the mythic story structure. The journey can be shown in twelve stages as shown below:

If you don’t write fantasy adventures like Tolkien or Homer you might be inclined to dismiss this approach. Don’t. Aspects of the hero’s journey permeate all stories and all genres and any writer may find these ideas useful. Vogler himself uses it to analyse movies such Titanic, The Lion King, Pulp Fiction, The Full Monty and Star Wars. The Hero’s Journey is really a model full of mythical metaphors that can be used to describe any stories that take the hero into a strange new world. It doesn’t have to be a fantasy world. For example, the worlds of business, finance or law; the fashion world; the world of politics; or for that matter the world of love.

Vogler’s structure is a quest structure in twelve stages. For simplicity, I will refer to the hero as ‘he’ but of course it would be just as relevant to use a female hero. Our hero is called to an adventure, where he crosses into a strange new world where he will be tested many times. He approaches a dangerous inner cave where he will be tested again in a life-threatening ordeal, before claiming his prize and taking the road home. But before he can return with his prize he must pass one final test (the climax) where he faces death (of his old self) and (symbolic) resurrection. Thus the hero emerges a new man that has learned what it means to be a hero. The hero’s journey is thus a journey of transformation as much as the physical journey, the transition occurring in the same twelve steps.

Vogler noted that the steps may not necessarily occur in the order stated, nor do all the steps necessarily apply to all stories. The terms such as death and resurrection, the ordeal and the reward are metaphors that can be used to describe any kind of story. Similarly the mythic archetypes such as the Shape Shifter, the Mentor, Threshold Guardians and more provide a rich vocabulary for describing all types of modern day characters.

The point Vogler makes is that the Hero’s journey is not a story by numbers approach, but something much more flexible. There are mythic elements present in all stories. That’s why stories are so appealing to the human spirit.