The Writer's Journey

by Christopher Vogler

  The waves are still rolling in from the pebbles in the pond that were the original Writer's Journey and its second edition. Since almost a decade has gone by since the second edition was launched, the ideas in that volume have been strenuously tested in a number of story-making laboratories around the world. Concepts I had developed as a story consultant for the Disney company and as a teacher of story construction have been through a fresh battery of challenges in the real world that I hope have made them stronger. The new chapters of this book will, I hope, reflect some of the ideas that have continued to evolve around the Hero's Journey concept. There are new chapters on the life force operating in stories, on the mechanism of polarity that rules in storytelling, on the wisdom of the body, catharsis, and other concepts that I have developed in recent years in my lectures and in practical work in Hollywood and in Europe. I have gathered together this new material near the end of the book, in an appendix following "Looking Back on the Journey."

  In the nine years since the last edition, I have traveled widely, applied my ideas to writing, publishing, and producing projects of my own, and done a few more "tours of duty" as it were for major Hollywood studios. The first of these jobs, commencing just after the publishing of the second edition, was a four-year return to 20th Century Fox, where I had been a story analyst at the beginning of my career. This time around I was operating at a slightly higher level, as a development executive for the Fox 2000 feature film label, with more responsibility and pressure. I was involved in the research and development aspects of films like Courage

  Under Fire, Volcano, Anna and the King, Fight Club, and The Thin Red Line. My concepts of storytelling, shaped by the patterns of mythology and the thinking of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, were now being tested not only on animated features but on big-budget, live-action movies for adult audiences.

  The office atmosphere of Fox 2000 was a fascinating place to study the ways of power. In the past I had been aware of places like it, but as a story analyst I had not been inside those meeting rooms where the decisions were taken about the writers, the stories, and the movies made from them. Power flows in those rooms like hot lava, and until I worked at Fox 2000 I had only heard it rumbling. Now I was standing hip deep in it.

  It was the most adult environment I had ever been in, run on unspoken but rigorous principles of personal responsibility. No whining allowed, no excuses. And the same fierce intensity was applied to the stories. Every concept, every comment, every suggestion had to pass the most stringent tests of common sense, logic, and show business instinct. I had the good fortune to work with some of the best story brains in the business, foremost among them being Fox 2000's founder Laura Ziskin, but also many talented executives, writers, directors, and producers. In this exacting laboratory I learned useful techniques for analyzing stories, ways of looking at characters and describing story situations that I hope will inform the new sections of this revised edition.

  Among the things I learned at Fox 2000 was to listen to my body as a judge of a story's effectiveness. I realized that the good stories were affecting the organs of my body in various ways, and the really good ones were stimulating more than one organ. An effective story grabs your gut, tightens your throat, makes your heart race and your lungs pump, brings tears to your eyes or an explosion of laughter to your lips. If I wasn't getting some kind of physiological reaction from a story, I knew it was only affecting me on an intellectual level and therefore it would probably leave audiences cold. You will find my thoughts about this in a new chapter on the wisdom of the body.

  When my job at Fox 2000 came to an end, as all good things must do, I wanted to write and produce some projects of my own. I soon found myself writing the screenplay for an animated feature, the result of a lecture trip to Munich. I was approached by producer Eberhard Junkersdorf to write the script for his version of the merry adventures of Till Eulenspiegel, Europe's favorite medieval clown. I knew of Tills colorful character from stories I had read as a child and was delighted to take up the challenge. I enjoyed working with the energetic and charming Herr Junkersdorf and his international team of artists. Eberhard is so persuasive he even got me to contribute lyrics for two songs on the film s soundtrack, which really was a challenge. The film was released in Germany as Till Euknspiegel, and I am hopeful it will be released in English one day under its English title, Jester Till The experience taught me a multitude of lessons that I have tried to incorporate into the present edition.

  Next up, I got involved as an executive producer of an independent feature, PS. Your Cat Is Dead, actor/director/writer Steve Guttenberg s adaptation of the play and novel by James Kirkwood. This took me deep into the editing room for a period of months, another of the sacred temples of the movie business and for me, a place of intense joy. I loved sitting in the dark staring at images all day long and making the pictures dance. I called it going into the submarine, a blissful world of concentration that called on every cell of my creativity and forced me to articulate my ideas in order to communicate with my creative partners. I could see many ways in which the editing process echoes the writing process, and imagined new possibilities for combining the two. I learned new principles and gave the old theories a good workout.

  The process of editing seemed to me to be a lot like making a wooden boat, like one of those sleek dragon-ships the Vikings made. The spine of the story is like the keel, the major plot points are the ribs, and the individual scenes and lines of dialogue are the planks and rigging that complete the vessel, a vehicle for your vision that you hope will sail on the seas of public attention.

  Another insight from the editing room was a greater appreciation of the importance of focus. I realized that focused attention is one of the rarest things in the world, and that an audience is giving a lot when they devote their full attention to your work for two hours. There is only so much focus available in a given work, and it seems the more elements you take out of a composition, the more focus is poured into those that remain. Cutting lines, pauses, and entire scenes sharpened the focus on the elements that were left, as if a large number of diffuse spotlights had been concentrated into a few bright beams aimed at select important points.

  PS. Your Cat Is Dead enjoyed a brief theatrical run and then was distributed on DVD. After that adventure I concentrated for a time on traveling to give seminars for various international cinema and television training programs. Most recently I have gone back to the Hollywood studio world with a tour of duty at Paramount Pictures and a number of consulting jobs for other studios. I tried my hand at a new form, writing the first installment of Ravenskull, a story for a "manga," a highly stylized kind of comic book from Japan. This is a highly cinematic form, much like writing a screenplay and with a great deal of emphasis on the visual.

  I hope something of what I have learned from collaborating with artists has found its way into this latest edition. It has been an intense pleasure to work with my artist friends Michele Montez and Fritz Springmeyer, whose illustrations provide the chapter headings in this volume.

  And while I'm cataloguing the influences of recent years that inform the changes in the present volume, some of my most valuable time was spent walking the beach and thinking about why things are as they are and how they got to be that way. I tried to understand how the sun and stars move across the sky and how the moon got there. I saw that it's all waves, all of the Universe, just echoes and counter-echoes of the original cosmic sound, not the Big Bang, that's the wrong sound effect. It was more like a gong, that's it, the Great Gong, the original creative vibration that rolled out from a single pinpoint of concentration and unraveled and echoed and collided to create everything that is, and the Hero's Journey is part of that. I watch the sun
sets march up and down the horizon, creating my own Stonehenge from the islands and ridge peaks that mark solstice and equinox, inviting me to puzzle out the place of stories and my own place in the story of everything. I hope you find your own place in that design. For those to whom the concept is new, bon voyage, and for those who are familiar with earlier versions, I hope you find some new surprises and connections in this work, and that it serves you on your own creative journeys.

  Christopher Vogler Venice, California February 26, 2007

  A book goes out like a wave rolling over the surface of the sea. Ideas radiate from the authors mind and collide with other minds, triggering new waves that return to the author. These generate further thoughts and emanations, and so it goes. The concepts described in The Writer's Journey have radiated and are now echoing back interesting challenges and criticisms as well as sympathetic vibrations. This is my report on the waves that have washed back over me from publication of the book, and on the new waves I send back in response.

  In this book I described the set of concepts known as "The Hero's Journey," drawn from the depth psychology of Carl G. Jung and the mythic studies of Joseph Campbell. I tried to relate those ideas to contemporary storytelling, hoping to create a writer's guide to these valuable gifts from our innermost selves and our most distant past. I came looking for the design principles of storytelling, but on the road I found something more: a set of principles for living. I came to believe that the Hero's Journey is nothing less than a handbook for life, a complete instruction manual in the art of being human.

  The Hero's Journey is not an invention, but an observation. It is a recognition of a beautiful design, a set of principles that govern the conduct of life and the world of storytelling the way physics and chemistry govern the physical world. It's difficult to avoid the sensation that the Hero's Journey exists somewhere, somehow, as an eternal reality, a Platonic ideal form, a divine model. From this model, infinite and highly varied copies can be produced, each resonating with the essential spirit of the form.

  The Hero's Journey is a pattern that seems to extend in many dimensions, describing more than one reality. It accurately describes, among other things, the process of making a journey, the necessary working parts of a story, the joys and despairs of being a writer, and the passage of a soul through life.

  A book that explores such a pattern naturally partakes of this multi—dimensional quality. The Writer's Journey was intended as a practical guidebook for writers, but can also be read as a guide to the life lessons that have been carefully built into the stories of all times. Some people have even used it as a kind of travel guide, predicting the inevitable ups and downs of making a physical journey.

  A certain number of people say the book has affected them on a level that may have nothing to do with the business of telling a story or writing a script. In the description of the Hero's Journey they might have picked up some insight about their own lives, some useful metaphor or way of looking at things, some language or principle that defines their problem and suggests a way out of it. They recognize their own problems in the ordeals of the mythic and literary heroes, and are reassured by the stories that give them abundant, time-tested strategies for survival, success, and happiness.

  Other people find validation of their own observations in the book. From time to time I meet people who know the Hero's Journey well although they may never have heard it called by that name. When they read about it or hear it described, they experience the pleasurable shock of recognition as the patterns resonate with what they've seen in stories and in their own lives. I had the same reaction when I first encountered these concepts in Campbell's book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and heard him speak about them with passion. Campbell himself felt it when he first heard his mentor, Heinrich Zimmer, speak about mythology. In Zimmer he recognized a shared attitude about myths — that they are not abstract theories or the quaint beliefs of ancient peoples, but practical models for understanding how to live.

  A PRACTICAL GUIDE

  The original intent of this book was to make an accessible, down-to-earth writing manual from these high-flying mythic elements. In that practical spirit, I am gratified to hear from so many readers that the book can be a useful writing guide. Professional writers as well as novices and students report that it has been an effective design tool, validating their instincts and providing new concepts and principles to apply to their stories. Movie and television executives, producers, and directors have told me the book influenced their projects and helped them solve story problems. Novelists, playwrights, actors, and writing teachers have put the ideas to use in their work.

  Happily, the book has won acceptance as one of the standard Hollywood guidebooks for the screenwriting craft. Spy magazine called it "the new industry Bible." Through the various international editions (U.K., German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Icelandic, etc.) it has radiated to greater Hollywood, the world community of storytellers. Filmmakers and students from many countries have reported their interest in the Hero's Journey idea and their appreciation for the book as a practical guide for designing and troubleshooting stories.

  The Writer's Journey, meanwhile, has been put to work in many ways, not only by writers in many forms and genres, but by teachers, psychologists, advertising executives, prison counselors, video game designers, and scholars of myth and pop culture.

  I am convinced the principles of the Hero's Journey have had a deep influence over the shaping of stories in the past and will reach even deeper in the future as more storytellers become consciously aware of them. Joseph Campbell's great accomplishment was to articulate clearly something that had been there all along — the life principles embedded in the structure of stories. He wrote down the unwritten rules of storytelling, and that seems to be stimulating authors to challenge, test, and embellish the Hero's Journey. I see signs that writers are playing with the ideas and even introducing "Campbellian" language and terms into their dramas.

  The conscious awareness of its patterns may be a mixed blessing, for it's easy to generate thoughtless cliches and stereotypes from this matrix. The self-conscious, heavy-handed use of this model can be boring and predictable. But if writers absorb its ideas and re-create them with fresh insights and surprising combinations, they can make amazing new forms and original designs from the ancient, immutable parts.

  QUESTIONS AND CRITICISMS

  "It takes a great enemy to make a great airplane ."

  — Air Force saying

  Inevitably, aspects of the book have been questioned or criticized. I welcome this as a sign the ideas are worthy of argument. I'm sure I've learned more from the challenges than from the positive feedback. Writing a book may be, as the historian Paul Johnson says, "the only way to study a subject systematically, purposefully and retentively." Harvesting the response, both positive and negative, is part of that study.

  Since the book came out in 1993 I have continued to work in the story end of the movie business, at Disney, Fox, and Paramount. I've had the chance to try out the Hero's Journey concepts with the big toys. I saw where it works but also where my understanding of it fell short and needed to be adjusted. My beliefs about what makes a good story were tested in the toughest arenas on earth — Hollywood story conferences and the world marketplace — and I hope my understanding has grown from the objections, doubts, and questions of my esteemed colleagues, and from the reaction of the audience.

  At the same time, I kept up a schedule of lecturing about The Writer's Journey that took me far afield from the literal, geographic bounds of Hollywood, into the greater-world Hollywood, the international film community. I had the fortune to see how the ideas of the Hero's Journey unfold in cultures different from the one I grew up in, as I traveled to Barcelona, Maui, Berlin, Rome, London, Sydney, and so on.

  Local tastes and thinking challenged many facets of the Hero's Journey idea severely. Each culture has a unique orientation to the Hero's Journey, with something in each local charac
ter resisting some terms, defining them differently, or giving them different emphasis. My theoretical framework has been shaken from every angle, and I think is the richer for it.

  A FORM, NOT A FORMULA

  First, I must address a significant objection about the whole idea of The Writer's Journey — the suspicion of artists and critics that it is formulaic, leading to stale repetition. We come to a great divide in theory and practice about these principles. Some professional writers don't like the idea of analyzing the creative process at all, and urge students to ignore all books and teachers and "Just do it." Some artists make the choice to avoid systematic thinking, rejecting all principles, ideals, schools of thought, theories, patterns, and designs. For them, art is an entirely intuitive process that can never be mastered by rules of thumb and should not be reduced to formula. And they aren't wrong. At the core of every artist is a sacred place where all the rules are set aside or deliberately forgotten, and nothing matters but the instinctive choices of the heart and soul of the artist.

  But even that is a principle, and those who say they reject principles and theories can't avoid subscribing to a few of them: Avoid formula, distrust order and pattern, resist logic and tradition.

  Artists who operate on the principle of rejecting all form are themselves dependent on form. The freshness and excitement of their work comes from its contrast to the pervasiveness of formulas and patterns in the culture. However, these artists run the risk of reaching a limited audience because most people can't relate to totally unconventional art. By definition it doesn't intersect with commonly held patterns of experience. Their work might only be appreciated by other artists, a small part of the community in any time or place. A certain amount of form is necessary to reach a wide audience. People expect it and enjoy it, so long as it's varied by some innovative combination or arrangement and doesn't fall into a completely predictable formula.

  At the other extreme are the big Hollywood studios who use conventional patterns to appeal to the broadest cross-section of the public. At the Disney studios, I saw the application of simple story principles, such as making the main character a "fish out of water," that became tests of a story's power to appeal to a mass audience. The minds guiding Disney at that time believed that there were proper questions to ask of a story and its characters: Does it have conflict? Does it have a theme? Is it about something that can be expressed as a well-known statement of folk wisdom like "Don't judge a book by its cover" or "Love conquers all"? Does it present the story as a series of broad movements or acts, allowing audiences to orient and pace themselves in the narrative? Does it take viewers someplace they've never been, or make them see familiar places in new ways? Do the characters have relevant back-stories and plausible motivations to make them relatable to the audience? Do they pass through realistic stages of emotional reaction and growth (character arcs)? And so on.