The Writer's Journey

by Christopher Vogler

  The wishes of heroes are a strong point of identification for many people, since we all have wishes and desires that we secretly cherish. In fact, that's one of the main reasons we go to movies and watch TV and read novels — to have our wishes granted. Storytellers are, most of the time, in the wish-granting business. The Disney empire built its entire corporate identity around the belief in wishing, from its theme song "When You Wish Upon a Star" to the wish-granting fairy godmothers of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, to the genie who grants three wishes in Aladdin. Hollywood executives and best-selling novelists aim to know the secret wishes of their audiences and fulfill them. Popular stories of recent years have granted widely held wishes to walk with the dinosaurs, trod the soil of alien planets, seek high adventure in mythic realms or in times gone by, and outpace the boundaries of space, time, and death itself. So-called "reality television" grants wishes on a nightly basis, bestowing on ordinary people the thrill of being seen by millions and having a shot at stardom or riches. Politicians and advertisers play on the wishes of the public, promising to grant security, peace of mind, or comfort. A good technique of Hollywood pitching is to begin by asking "Did you ever wish you could —" (fly, be invisible, go back in time to fix your mistakes, etc.), connecting up the desires of the story's hero with a strong wish that a lot of people might have.

  THE WISHES OF THE AUDIENCE

  It pays to think about what audience members wish for themselves and the heroes in stories. As writers we play a tricky game with our readers and viewers. We evoke a strong wish through our characters, then spend most of the story frustrating the wish, making it seem that the characters will never get what they want or need. Usually, in the end, we grant those wishes, and show how they are achieved by struggle, by overcoming obstacles, and by reconsidering them, with the desire sometimes shifting from what the hero thinks she wants to what she really needs.

  We thwart the deep wishes of the audience at our peril. Movies that deny the wishes of the audience to see the heroes ultimately happy or fulfilled may not perform well at the box office. The audience will inwardly cheer for poetic justice — the hero receiving rewards proportionate to his struggle, the villain receiving punishment equivalent to the suffering he has inflicted on others. If that sense of poetic justice is violated, if the rewards and punishments and lessons don't match up to our wishes for the characters, we sense something is wrong with the story, and go away unsatisfied.

  We have wishes for our villains as well as our heroes. I remember my mother, an astute critic of popular movies and books, muttering under her breath phrases like "I hope he dies a horrible death," when a villain had done something particularly heinous to one of her heroes on the screen. If the movie didn't deliver a poetically appropriate fate for the villain, she was disappointed and that movie went down in her books as a bad one.

  Once in a while, the strategy of thwarting the audience's desires is effective, to challenge the assumptions of the watchers, to reflect a harsh view of reality, or to depict a tragic, doomed situation as a kind of warning to the audience. For example, in the novel and movie Remains of the Day, the butler to the family of a British lord spends his entire life failing to connect emotionally with other people. His wish, we might say, is to have a sense of tight control over his personal life, one area where he does not compromise. This masks a deeper desire, the need to make an emotional and physical connection with another human being. The audience forms a strong wish for him to be happy, to seize an opportunity for intimacy that comes his way late in life. But, true to his tragic character, he doesn't take the chance for change, and the movie ends with the feeling that though he has gotten what he wants (privacy and control), he will never get what he needs, or what we wish for him and ourselves. It plays as a cautionary tale, a warning to us — if we don't take up the opportunities that life offers us, we could end up frustrated and alone. In this case, our wish to see the character happy is superseded by our need to realize that we could end up in the same sad situation if we don't open up to opportunities to love.

  The focus on wishing that gives life to many tales is but one of the verbs that activate the emotional mechanisms of story. Wishes must be translated into action, dreams must be made real, or else the story, and perhaps a person's life, will stagnate, stuck in an unrealistic, endless fantasy of daydreaming. Wishing is important, for it is the first step in a pyramid of mental states, the yearning of a seed to grow into something great. It forms the initial intention of a story, or the beginning of a new phase of someone's life. "Be careful what you wish for" applies in a multitude of cases, as stories show us over and over that a wish is a powerful act of the imagination. The idea is constantly affirmed in stories that human imagination is extremely powerful, especially when focused into a wish, but that it is difficult to control. The wish and the imagination work together to create a mental image of the desired thing, person, situation, or outcome, so vivid that it calls the adventure into being, and launches the hero in the direction of seeing how the wish will actually be fulfilled, usually in an unsuspected and challenging way. The image may be faint and hazy in the beginning, or detailed but highly idealized and unrealistic, a fantasy of the future uninformed by real experience.

  But for a story or a person's life to move along it is necessary to pierce the bubble of fantasy, and to convert wishing into something else — doing, the next step of the pyramid. The essence of movies is the director's command, "Action." Do something, actors. The root of the word "actor" is "do-er," someone who does something. Dreams and wishes must be tested in the crucible of reality, in action, by doing.

  PROGRESSING FROM WISHING TO WILLING

  Encountering conflicts and obstacles can force characters to evolve to a yet higher level on the pyramid of emotions, that of willing, which is quite a different mental state than mere wishing. Martial arts and classic philosophies teach people to develop a strong will, so that wishes can be transformed into actions, so that even when distracted or set back by obstacles, the developing personality can return quickly to the center line of its intention. Will is a wish concentrated and focused into a firm intention to achieve a goal step by step. Wishes can evaporate at the first setback but the will endures.

  Willing is a kind of filter, separating those who only wish from those who actually take responsibility for improving themselves and pay the price of real change. With a focused will, a character can take the blows and setbacks that life hands out. Martial arts strengthen the will, as stories do, by delivering a series of blows and falls that toughen the student. Challenging and stressful situations are repeatedly introduced so that the developing person becomes more resilient, accustomed to conflict and opposition, and determined to overcome any obstacle.

  Like making a wish, making an act of the will calls forces into motion. A strong act of will sends out signals to the world. Here is someone who wants something and is willing to pay a high price to get it. All sorts of allies and opponents will be summoned by such a declaration, each with its lesson to teach.

  Like wishing, the will must be managed. A will for power can be dangerous, and an overly strong will can overpower and victimize weaker ones. But the development of a strong will, outgrowing the stage of simple wishing, is a necessary stage of human development.

  There is a connection between needs and willing. Both evolve from the idea of wishing or wanting. Once you progress beyond wishing to knowing what your needs truly are, you can focus your vague wishes into much more concentrated acts of the will. All the levels of your being can be aligned in the direction of achieving a clear and realistic goal. The girl in "Rumpelstiltskin" starts as a passive victim, just crying her eyes out and sitting alone in a room wishing to be anywhere but there. When she is a little older and realizes she needs to protect the life of her child, she develops a will and applies it again and again until she accomplishes her goal.

  The language of movies and fantasy, particularly that of the Disney variety, tends to show us the
magical power of wishing but often stops short at that point, leaving the other steps of the pyramid unsaid but implied. Often fantasies are dedicated solely to exploring the mechanisms of wishing, developing the "Be careful what you wish for" concept to show that wishes might have to be refined or re-stated to adjust to reality, without necessarily evolving into the more powerful and focused mental state of willing an outcome. Sometimes an entire story remains in the wish mode by ending not with the development of a strong will, but the forming of a new wish, simply transferring unfocused desire from one object to the next.

  Wishing and willing can be selfish mental states, and there are undoubtedly other possible steps higher on the pyramid of human emotional development, which might include learning to love, learning to have compassion for other beings, or in a few highly spiritual stories, learning to transcend human desires entirely to merge with a higher form of consciousness. But it's clear that wishing and its more evolved form, willing, are important tools for storytellers and necessary stages of everyone's development. Wishing in particular seems to invite a story to come to life and consciousness, launching an adventure that may teach us valuable lessons in survival.

  And what about poor Rumpelstiltskin, tearing himself in two because he can't have the child he wants for unknown purposes? The outcome of the story doesn't seem fair. True, he has tried to kidnap a child from its mother, but what if he has a right to the child? The Queen has a bad record of motherhood, having bartered her child's life for her freedom, and the presumed father, the King, would make a menacing role model for a child, having threatened to behead his future wife. For all we know, the little man might have made a better parent to the child than either of them. Rumpelstiltskin loses the child because the young Queen is able to meet his seemingly impossible conditions, but what if he has a right to custody of the child, and not because of the deal he made with her that night? After all, what is there to do in an empty room for three nights when all the straw has been spun into gold?

  QUESTIONS

  1. Have you noticed examples of characters making wishes early in stories? Give an example and tell how the wish was granted (or not) by the story.

  2. What has been the role of wishing in your life? Have you learned to be careful what you wish for? Is there a story in that experience?

  3. What are your short-term and long-term wishes, and how can you convert them into will and action? How would that work for characters in your story?

  4. Can you think of examples of a story providing an unexpected answer to a character s wish? Write a story around the idea of someone wishing for something.

  5. Are there wishes expressed or implied in other classic fairy tales and myths? How are the wishes granted or denied? Write a modern version of a fairy tale or myth and use the concept of wishing.

  6. Read a myth, view a movie, read a book and analyze what universal wishes the story satisfies. What human wishes are expressed in your story?

  7. Are there such things as fate or destiny? What do these terms mean to you? Do they have a role any more in modern life?

  8. Brainstorm around the concept of wishing. Write the word in the center of a blank page and then around it write all the things you have wished for or are now wishing for in the future. See if some patterns emerge. Are your wishes realistic? What happens when your wishes are granted? What is keeping you from granting your own wishes? Apply the same exercise to a character. What is he or she wishing for? How do they convert wishing into will to achieve their goals?

  A persistent feature of the Hero's Journey is that its stories tend to be polarized like two essential forces of nature, electricity and magnetism. Like them, stories create energy or exert force through polarities that organize the elements present into opposing camps with contrasting properties and orientations. Polarity is an essential principle of storytelling, governed by a few simple rules but capable of generating infinite conflict, complexity, and audience involvement.

  A story needs a sense of oneness — unity — to feel like a satisfying and complete expression. It needs a single theme — a spine — something to unite it into a coherent work. But a story also needs a level of two-ness, a dimension of duality, to create tension and the possibility of movement. As soon as you choose a single thought or character to unite your story, you have automatically generated its polar opposite, a contrary concept or antagonistic character, and therefore a duality or polarized system that conducts energy between the two parties. Unity begets duality; the existence of one implies the possibility of two.

  As soon as you imagine two points in space, you have generated a line of force between them and the potential for interaction, communication, deal-making, movement, emotion, and conflict.

  If your story is about the single quality of trust, the possibility of suspicion immediately arises. Suspicion is necessary to test and challenge the concept of trust. If your main character wants something, there must be someone who doesn't want her to get it, who brings out hidden qualities in your hero by opposing her. If not, there's no story. We enjoy stories that are polarized by a struggle between two strong characters, like The African Queen or Driving Miss Daisy, but we are also entertained by stories polarized by great principles of living that tug the characters in two directions at once, so they are torn between duty and love, for example, or between revenge and forgiveness. Many a show-business tale like The Buddy Holly Story is polarized by loyalty and ambition; loyalty to the group that the hero grew up with versus the demands of ambition that require ditching those people when the hero moves to a new level of success.

  Every aspect of the Hero's Journey is polarized along at least two lines, the inner and outer dimensions and the positive and negative possibilities for each element. These polarities create potential for contrast, challenge, conflict, and learning. As the polarized nature of magnetic fields can be used to generate electrical energy, polarity in a story seems to be an engine that generates tension and movement in the characters and a stirring of emotions in the audience.

  We live in a polarized universe, both as a physical fact all around us and as a deeply ingrained mental habit. On the physical level we are ruled by the very real polarities of day and night, up and down, earth and space, inside and outside. Our bodies are polarized, with limbs and organs distributed to the left and right sides, and a brain whose left and right sides have quite different responsibilities. We are polarized as a species, coming in two basic models, male and female. Polarized categories like age and youth or life and death are realities that no one can ignore.

  The Universe itself seems to be polarized into systems like matter and energy, matter and anti-matter, atoms that carry plus or minus charges, positive or negative poles in magnetism and electricity. Our entire galaxy is polarized, a spinning disk of stars, dust, and gases that has definite north and south poles and its own polarized magnetic field. And of course the whole world of modern computer technology has been generated from a simple binary system, 0 and I, a polarized off-on switch which apparently can yield infinite computing power from one little polarity.

  Polarity is an equally pervasive force as a habit of thinking. We often act as if all questions have a right or wrong answer, all statements are either true or false, people are either good or bad, normal or abnormal. Either a thing is real or it isn't. Either you are with me or against me. Sometimes these categories are useful, but they can also be limiting and may not adequately represent reality. Polarization is a powerful force in politics and rhetoric, allowing leaders and propagandists to mobilize anger and passion by artificially dividing the world into "us" and "them" categories, a simplification of the world that makes it easier to deal with, but ignores many intermediate or alternative points of view.

  However, polarity is a real phenomenon in human relationships and an important engine of conflict in storytelling. Characters in relationships strongly tend to become polarized as part of their process of growing and learning through conflict. Polarity follows certain
rules, and good storytellers instinctively exploit them for their dramatic potential.

  THE RULES OF POLARITY

  I. Opposites Attract

  The first rule of polarity is that opposites attract. A story is in some ways like a magnet with its mysterious, invisible power of attraction. Two magnets, properly aligned, with the south pole of one pointed at the north pole of the other, will strongly attract each other, just as two contrasting characters can be drawn powerfully to one another. The clash of their differences attracts and holds an audience's attention.

  Two lovers, friends, or allies may be attracted to one another because they complete one other, perhaps clashing at first because they possess contrasting qualities, but discovering that each needs something the other has. Unconsciously, people may seek out those whose strengths and weaknesses balance weak and strong qualities in themselves.

  Hero and villain may be locked together in a struggle, drawn together by circumstances but operating in strongly contrasting, polarized ways that show the whole range of possible human responses to a stressful situation. Nations may be drawn into polarized conflicts because of radically opposed ways of perceiving reality.

  2. Polarized Conflict Attracts the Audience