The Writer's Journey

by Christopher Vogler

  The hero is transformed by these moments of death-and-rebirth, and is able to return to ordinary life reborn as a new being with new insights.

  The Star Wars films play with this element constantly. The films of the "original trilogy" feature a final battle scene in which Luke is almost killed, appears to be dead for a moment, and then miraculously survives. Each Ordeal wins him new knowledge and command over the Force. He is transformed into a new being by his experience.

  Axel Foley in the climactic sequence of Beverly Hills Cop once again faces death at the hands of the villain, but is rescued by the intervention of the Beverly Hills police force. He emerges from the experience with a greater respect for cooperation, and is a more complete human being.

  An Officer and a Gentleman offers a more complex series of final ordeals, as the hero faces death in a number of ways. Zack's selfishness dies as he gives up the chance for a personal athletic trophy in favor of helping another cadet over an obstacle. His relationship with his girlfriend seems to be dead, and he must survive the crushing blow of his best friend's suicide. As if that weren't enough, he also endures a final hand-to-hand, life-or-death battle with his drill instructor, but survives it all and is transformed into the gallant "officer and gentleman" of the title.

  12. Return with the Elixir

  The hero Returns to the Ordinary World, but the journey is meaningless unless she brings back some Elixir, treasure, or lesson from the Special World. The Elixir is a magic potion with the power to heal. It may be a great treasure like the Grail that magically heals the wounded land, or it simply might be knowledge or experience that could be useful to the community someday.

  Dorothy returns to Kansas with the knowledge that she is loved, and that "There's no place like home." E.T. returns home with the experience of friendship with humans. Luke Skywalker defeats Darth Vader (for the time being) and restores peace and order to the galaxy.

  Zack Mayo wins his commission and leaves the Special World of the training base with a new perspective. In the sparkling new uniform of an officer (with a new attitude to match) he literally sweeps his girlfriend off her feet and carries her away.

  Sometimes the Elixir is treasure won on the quest, but it may be love, freedom, wisdom, or the knowledge that the Special World exists and can be survived. Sometimes it's just coming home with a good story to tell.

  Unless something is brought back from the Ordeal in the Inmost Cave, the hero is doomed to repeat the adventure. Many comedies use this ending, as a foolish character refuses to learn his lesson and embarks on the same folly that got him in trouble in the first place.

  To recap the Hero's Journey:

  1. Heroes are introduced in the ORDINARY WORLD, where

  2. they receive the CALL TO ADVENTURE.

  3. They are RELUCTANT at first or REFUSE THE CALL, but

  4. are encouraged by a MENTOR to

  5. CROSS THE FIRST THRESHOLD and enter the Special World, where

  6. they encounter TESTS, ALLIES, AND ENEMIES.

  7. They APPROACH THE INMOST CAVE, crossing a second threshold

  8. where they endure the ORDEAL.

  9. They take possession of their REWARD and

  10. are pursued on THE ROAD BACK to the Ordinary World.

  11. They cross the third threshold, experience a RESURRECTION, and are transformed by the experience.

  12. They RETURN WITH THE ELIXIR, a boon or treasure to benefit the Ordinary World.

  The Hero's Journey is a skeletal framework that should be fleshed out with the details and surprises of the individual story. The structure should not call attention to itself, nor should it be followed too precisely. The order of the stages given here is only one of many possible variations. The stages can be deleted, added to, and drastically shuffled without losing any of their power.

  The values of the Hero's Journey are what's important. The images of the basic version — young heroes seeking magic swords from old wizards, maidens risking death to save loved ones, knights riding off to fight evil dragons in deep caves, and so on — are just symbols of universal life experiences. The symbols can be changed infinitely to suit the story at hand and the needs of the society.

  The Hero's Journey is easily translated to contemporary dramas, comedies, romances, or action-adventures by substituting modern equivalents for the symbolic

  figures and props of the hero's story. The wise old man or woman may be a real shaman or wizard, but may also be any kind of Mentor or teacher, doctor or therapist, "crusty but benign" boss, tough but fair top sergeant, parent, grandparent, or guiding, helping figure.

  Modern heroes may not be going into caves and labyrinths to fight mythical beasts, but they do enter a Special World and an Inmost Cave by venturing into space, to the bottom of the sea, into the depths of a modern city, or into their own hearts.

  The patterns of myth can be used to tell the simplest comic book story or the most sophisticated drama. The Hero's Journey grows and matures as new experiments are tried within its framework. Changing the traditional sex and relative ages of the archetypes only makes it more interesting, and allows ever more complex webs of understanding to be spun among them. The basic figures can be combined, or each can be divided into several characters to show different aspects of the same idea.

  The Hero's Journey is infinitely flexible, capable of endless variation without sacrificing any of its magic, and it will outlive us all.

  Now that we've looked over the map, let's meet the characters who populate the landscape of storytelling: the Archetypes.

  As soon as you enter the world of fairy tales and myths, you become aware of recurring character types and relationships: questing heroes, heralds who call them to adventure, wise old men and women who give them magical gifts, threshold guardians who seem to block their way, shapeshifting fellow travelers who confuse and dazzle them, shadowy villains who try to destroy them, tricksters who upset the status quo and provide comic relief. In describing these common character types, symbols, and relationships the Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung employed the term archetypes, meaning ancient patterns of personality that are the shared heritage of the human race.

  Jung suggested there may be a collective unconscious, similar to the personal unconscious. Fairy tales and myths are like the dreams of an entire culture, springing from the collective unconscious. The same character types seem to occur on both the personal and the collective scale. The archetypes are amazingly constant throughout all times and cultures, in the dreams and personalities of individuals as well as in the mythic imagination of the entire world. An understanding of these forces is one of the most powerful elements in the modern storyteller's bag of tricks.

  The concept of archetypes is an indispensable tool for understanding the purpose or function of characters in a story. If you grasp the function of the archetype which a particular character is expressing, it can help you determine if the character is pulling her full weight in the story. The archetypes are part of the universal language of storytelling, and a command of their energy is as essential to the writer as breathing.

  Joseph Campbell spoke of the archetypes as biological: as expressions of the organs of the body, built into the wiring of every human being. The universality of these patterns makes possible the shared experience of storytelling. Storytellers instinctively choose characters and relationships that resonate to the energy of the archetypes, to create dramatic experiences that are recognizable to everyone. Becoming aware of the archetypes can only expand your command of your craft.

  ARCHETYPES AS FUNCTIONS

  When I first began working with these ideas I thought of an archetype as a fixed role which a character would play exclusively throughout a story. Once I identified a character as a mentor, I expected her to remain a mentor and only a mentor. However, as I worked with fairy tale motifs as a story consultant for Disney Animation, I encountered another way of looking at the archetypes — not as rigid character roles but as functions performed temporarily
by characters to achieve certain effects in a story. This observation comes from the work of the Russian fairy tale expert Vladimir Propp, whose book, Morphology of the Folktale, analyzes motifs and recurrent patterns in hundreds of Russian tales.

  Looking at the archetypes in this way, as flexible character functions rather than as rigid character types, can liberate your storytelling. It explains how a character in a story can manifest the qualities of more than one archetype. The archetypes can be thought of as masks, worn by the characters temporarily as they are needed to advance the story. A character might enter the story performing the function of a herald, then switch masks to function as a trickster, a mentor, and a shadow.

  FACETS OF THE HERO'S PERSONALITY

  Another way to look at the classic archetypes is that they are facets of the hero's (or the writer's) personality. The other characters represent possibilities for the hero, for good or ill. A hero sometimes proceeds through the story gathering and incorporating the energy and traits of the other characters. She learns from the other characters, fusing them into a complete human being who has picked up something from everyone she has met along the way.

  The archetypes can also be regarded as personified symbols of various human qualities. Like the major arcana cards of the Tarot, they stand for the aspects of a complete human personality. Every good story reflects the total human story, the universal human condition of being born into this world, growing, learning, struggling to become an individual, and dying. Stories can be read as metaphors for the general human situation, with characters who embody universal, archetypal qualities, comprehensible to the group as well as the individual.

  THE MOST COMMON AND USEFUL ARCHETYPES

  For the storyteller, certain character archetypes are indispensable tools of the trade. You can't tell stories without them. The archetypes that occur most frequently in stories, and that seem to be the most useful for the writer to understand, are:

  HERO

  MENTOR (Wise Old Man or Woman)

  THRESHOLD GUARDIAN

  HERALD

  SHAPESHIFTER

  SHADOW

  ALLY

  TRICKSTER

  There are, of course, many more archetypes; as many as there are human qualities to dramatize in stories. Fairy tales are crowded with archetypal figures: the Wolf, the Hunter, the Good Mother, the Wicked Stepmother, the Fairy Godmother, the Witch, the Prince or Princess, the Greedy Innkeeper, and so forth, who perform highly specialized functions. Jung and others have identified many psychological archetypes, such as the Puer Aeternus or eternal boy, who can be found in myths as the ever-youthful Cupid, in stories as characters such as Peter Pan, and in life as men who never want to grow up.

  Particular genres of modern stories have their specialized character types, such as the "Whore with the Heart of Gold" or the "Arrogant West Point Lieutenant" in Westerns, the "Good Cop/Bad Cop" pairing in buddy pictures, or the "Tough but Fair Sergeant" in war movies.

  However, these are only variants and refinements of the archetypes discussed in the following chapters. The archetypes we will discuss are the most basic patterns, from which all others are shaped to fit the needs of specific stories and genres.

  Two questions are helpful for a writer trying to identify the nature of an archetype: 1) What psychological function or part of the personality does it represent? and 2) What is its dramatic function in a story?

  Keep these questions in mind as we look at eight of the basic archetypes, the people or energies we are likely to meet on the Hero's Journey.

  The word hero is Greek, from a root that means "to protect and to serve" (incidentally the motto of the Los Angeles Police Department). A Hero is someone who is willing to sacrifice his own needs on behalf of others, like a shepherd who will sacrifice to protect and serve his flock. At the root the idea of Hero is connected with self-sacrifice. (Note that I use the word Hero to describe a central character or protagonist of either sex.)

  PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTION

  In psychological terms, the archetype of the Hero represents what Freud called the ego — that part of the personality that separates from the mother, that considers itself distinct from the rest of the human race. Ultimately, a Hero is one who is able to transcend the bounds and illusions of the ego, but at first, Heroes are all ego: the I, the one, that personal identity which thinks it is separate from the rest of the group. The journey of many Heroes is the story of that separation from the family or tribe, equivalent to a child's sense of separation from the mother.

  The Hero archetype represents the ego's search for identity and wholeness. In the process of becoming complete, integrated human beings, we are all Heroes facing internal guardians, monsters, and helpers. In the quest to explore our own minds we find teachers, guides, demons, gods, mates, servants, scapegoats, masters, seducers, betrayers, and allies, as aspects of our personalities and characters in our dreams. All the villains, tricksters, lovers, friends, and foes of the Hero can be found inside ourselves. The psychological task we all face is to integrate these separate parts into one complete, balanced entity. The ego, the Hero thinking she is separate from all these parts of herself, must incorporate them to become the Self.

  DRAMATIC FUNCTIONS AUDIENCE IDENTIFICATION

  The dramatic purpose of the Hero is to give the audience a window into the story. Each person hearing a tale or watching a play or movie is invited, in the early stages of the story, to identify with the Hero, to merge with him and see the world of the story through his eyes. Storytellers do this by giving their Heroes a combination of qualities, a mix of universal and unique characteristics.

  Heroes have qualities that we all can identify with and recognize in ourselves. They are propelled by universal drives that we can all understand: the desire to be loved and understood, to succeed, survive, be free, get revenge, right wrongs, or seek self-expression.

  Stories invite us to invest part of our personal identity in the Hero for the duration of the experience. In a sense we become the Hero for a while. We project ourselves into the Hero's psyche, and see the world through her eyes. Heroes need some admirable qualities, so that we want to be like them. We want to experience the self-confidence of Katharine Hepburn, the elegance of Fred Astaire, the wit of Cary Grant, the sexiness of Marilyn Monroe.

  Heroes should have universal qualities, emotions, and motivations that everyone has experienced at one time or another: revenge, anger, lust, competition, territoriality, patriotism, idealism, cynicism, or despair. But Heroes must also be unique human beings, rather than stereotypical creatures or tin gods without flaws

  or unpredictability. Like any effective work of art they need both universality and originality. Nobody wants to see a movie or read a story about abstract qualities in human form. We want stories about real people. A real character, like a real person, is not just a single trait but a unique combination of many qualities and drives, some of them conflicting. And the more conflicting, the better. A character torn by warring allegiances to love and duty is inherently interesting to an audience. A character who has a unique combination of contradictory impulses, such as trust and suspicion or hope and despair, seems more realistic and human than one who displays only one character trait.

  A well-rounded Hero can be determined, uncertain, charming, forgetful, impatient, and strong in body but weak at heart, all at the same time. It's the particular combination of qualities that gives an audience the sense that the Hero is one of a kind, a real person rather than a type.

  GROWTH

  Another story function of the Hero is learning or growth. In evaluating a script sometimes it's hard to tell who is the main character, or who should be. Often the best answer is: the one who learns or grows the most in the course of the story. Heroes overcome obstacles and achieve goals, but they also gain new knowledge and wisdom. The heart of many stories is the learning that goes on between a Hero and a mentor, or a Hero and a lover, or even between a Hero and a villain. We are all each other's te
achers.

  ACTION

  Another heroic function is acting or doing. The Hero is usually the most active person in the script. His will and desire is what drives most stories forward. A frequent flaw in screenplays is that the Hero is fairly active throughout the story, but at the most critical moment becomes passive and is rescued by the timely arrival of some outside force. At this moment above all, a Hero should be fully active, in control of his own fate. The Hero should perform the decisive action of the story, the action that requires taking the most risk or responsibility.

  SACRIFICE

  People commonly think of Heroes as strong or brave, but these qualities are secondary to sacrifice — the true mark of a Hero. Sacrifice is the Hero's willingness to give up something of value, perhaps even her own life, on behalf of an ideal or a group. Sacrifice means "making holy." In ancient times people made sacrifices, even of human beings, to acknowledge their debt to the spirit world, the gods, or nature, to appease those mighty forces, and to make holy the processes of daily life. Even death became sanctified, a holy act.

  DEALING WITH DEATH

  At the heart of every story is a confrontation with death. If the Hero doesn't face actual death, then there is the threat of death or symbolic death in the form of a high-stakes game, love affair, or adventure in which the Hero may succeed (live) or fail (die).

  Heroes show us how to deal with death. They may survive it, proving that death is not so tough. They may die (perhaps only symbolically) and be reborn, proving that death can be transcended. They may die a Hero's death, transcending death by offering up their lives willingly for a cause, an ideal, or a group.

  True heroism is shown in stories when Heroes offer themselves on the altar of chance, willing to take the risk that their quest for adventure may lead to danger, loss, or death. Like soldiers who know that by enlisting they have agreed to give their lives if their country asks them to, Heroes accept the possibility of sacrifice.