The hero's journey for screenwriters

Campbell's monomyth

In 1949 Joseph Campbell, who taught literature at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, published The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He had read myths, folk tales and religious stories from many cultures and argued that a great number of them follow the same underlying path. He called that path the monomyth, a word he borrowed from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

In outline, someone leaves the everyday world for a strange and dangerous one, comes through a great trial there, and brings back something that changes life for the people at home. Campbell traced it through seventeen stages in three parts. Few stories use all seventeen, and Campbell wrote as a scholar of myth, with no screenwriters in mind.

The book reached film through George Lucas, who has said it helped him shape Star Wars (1977).

Vogler's twelve stages for screenwriters

In the 1980s Christopher Vogler, then reading scripts as a story analyst for Disney, wrote a seven-page memo called A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It applied Campbell's pattern to films and was passed around widely in Hollywood. Vogler later expanded it into a book, The Writer's Journey, first published in 1992 and revised several times since, and he contributed to the story of Disney's The Lion King (1994).

He cut Campbell's seventeen stages to twelve, gave them plainer names, and laid them over the three acts screenwriters already used. When screenwriters talk about the hero's journey today, it is usually Vogler's version they mean.

The twelve stages

The positions in brackets are ours and approximate: a share of the script, and the page it suggests in a 110-page feature. Vogler places the stages act by act and leaves the pages to the writer.

1. Ordinary World (the first tenth, pages 1 to 10). The hero at home before anything happens, with what they lack or long for in plain view, so the audience has something to measure the change against.
2. Call to Adventure (about 10%, page 11). A problem, a message or a chance arrives that the ordinary world can't absorb. It might be a letter, a summons, a death in the family or a storm.
3. Refusal of the Call (10 to 15%, pages 11 to 17). The hero hangs back, out of fear, duty or plain reluctance. The hesitation shows what they stand to lose. When the hero is eager, someone near them often voices the doubt in their place.
4. Meeting with the Mentor (about 20%, page 22). Someone gives the hero what they need to set out: advice, training, a gift, or the push they were waiting for. The mentor can also be a book, a memory or a code the hero lives by.
5. Crossing the First Threshold (about a quarter, page 27). The hero commits and enters the special world. Act One ends here, and after this point going back is no longer easy.
6. Tests, Allies and Enemies (25 to 45%, pages 27 to 50). The hero learns how the new world works, finds out whom to trust, and is tested along the way. Much of a film's entertainment lives in this stretch.
7. Approach to the Inmost Cave (45 to 50%, pages 50 to 55). The hero and the allies close in on the place where the central danger waits. Plans are made and go wrong, and the tension tightens.
8. The Ordeal (about halfway, page 55). The greatest danger yet. The hero comes close to death, literally or in some other sense, and part of who they were doesn't survive it. In most films it sits near the midpoint, though some push it later.
9. Reward (55 to 65%, pages 60 to 72). Having come through, the hero takes hold of what they came for. Sometimes it is an object or a secret, and sometimes it is a reconciliation with someone they had lost. Vogler also calls this stage Seizing the Sword.
10. The Road Back (about 75%, page 82). The hero sets off home, or is driven out, and the forces they defied come after them. This is the turn into Act Three.
11. Resurrection (85 to 95%, pages 94 to 105). The climax. One final test, harder than the ordeal, in which the hero has to use everything the story has taught them and nearly loses. What they do here proves the change.
12. Return with the Elixir (the last pages). Home again, the hero brings back something that matters there. In myth it is a cure or a treasure; in most films it is what they learned by living through the story. Set the closing scenes beside the opening ones and the difference should be easy to see.

A worked example: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

L. Frank Baum's novel of 1900 is in the public domain and follows the twelve stages closely. The details are the book's, which differs in places from the 1939 film: Dorothy's shoes are silver, for one, and the good witch who meets her is the Witch of the North. There are 24 chapters.

Look closely and the book bends the pattern in places. The cyclone does most of the threshold's work, throwing Dorothy into the special world before she can choose it, so her setting out in chapter 3 is a quieter crossing than most. The ordeal falls at the end of chapter 12 of 24, exactly halfway. The resurrection is gentle, and its test is a discovery: the way home was on her feet from the start, and she learns it only once each of her friends is settled. She brings back no treasure either. The elixir is the grey farm itself, seen by a girl who spent the whole book trying to get back to it.

The stages and the three acts

Vogler fitted his stages to the act structure screenwriters already knew, so the two line up closely. The turning points of three-act structure fall on particular stages.

Against the fifteen beats on our beat sheet, the call falls near the Catalyst, the threshold at Break into Two and the ordeal by the Midpoint.

In ScriptopusHero's Journey is one of the structures the Beat Board offers before you start, and one of the frameworks in Story Canvas's Structure panel. The app's version has eleven stages: it keeps most of Vogler's names, has no separate stage for the approach or the resurrection, and ends on one called Transformation. On the Beat Board each stage becomes a sequence with a share of your runtime. In Story Canvas the panel joins the stages in a loop, the last back to the first, or places each at its minute on a timeline. Both are in the free plan.

The archetypes

Drawing on Campbell and on the psychologist Carl Jung, Vogler also describes a cast of character types that keep turning up in these stories. He treats them as roles a character plays at a given moment, so one character can move between several. In Oz most of them are easy to spot.

• Hero. The character whose change the story follows. Dorothy.
• Mentor. Teaches, equips or protects the hero. The Witch of the North, and later Glinda.
• Threshold guardian. Stands at the entrance to a new stage and has to be passed, persuaded or won over. The Guardian of the Gates, with his box of green spectacles.
• Herald. Announces that change is coming. It is often an event, and in Oz it is the cyclone.
• Shapeshifter. Hard to pin down, and never quite what they seem. The Wizard meets each visitor in a different form: a great head, a lovely lady, a terrible beast, a ball of fire.
• Shadow. The force that opposes the hero, often a dark reflection of them. The Wicked Witch of the West.
• Ally. The companions who help along the way: the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Lion, and for a chapter the Queen of the Field Mice.
• Trickster. Brings mischief, and punctures pretension. The Wizard turns out to be one of these too, a humbug who admits it when he is caught.

When the shape suits a story

The hero's journey suits stories in which somebody goes somewhere: quests, adventures, coming-of-age stories, a stranger arriving in an unfamiliar place. It also works when the special world is a new job, a love affair or a grief, as long as there is a clear crossing into the unknown and a return of some kind.

It fits less well when the story is about staying put, when several characters share the lead, or when nobody comes back. Tragedy breaks the pattern on purpose: the hero crosses the threshold and the return never comes. A slow portrait of a marriage or a town has no single crossing to build on.

The bigger risk is the mould. Pushed through all twelve stages, very different stories end up with the same mentor speech at the same minute and the same brush with death in the third act, and audiences notice. Writers who use the model well tend to treat the stages as questions to put to a draft, such as who plays the mentor here and where the threshold really is.

The criticism

Campbell's scholarship was questioned early. Folklorists have argued that he picked the myths that fit his pattern and passed over the many that don't, and that his idea of the hero leans heavily on male adventurers. The writer and therapist Maureen Murdock answered with The Heroine's Journey (1990), after Campbell had told her, by her account, that women didn't need to take that road at all.

Among film people the complaint is sameness, and the twelve stages often take some of the blame for big studio films that feel alike. Vogler himself presents them as flexible, there to be reordered, merged or skipped.

Download the hero's journey sheet

The twelve stages on a planning sheet, each with a line on what it does, where it tends to fall in a 110-page script, and a box for your own story. A second page lists the archetypes, so you can note who plays each role, and has the Oz example filled in.

Questions

Sources and further reading

1. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), for the monomyth and its seventeen stages.
2. Christopher Vogler, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (first published 1992), the book that grew from his Disney memo, for the twelve stages and the archetypes in full.
3. Maureen Murdock, The Heroine's Journey (1990).
4. L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), at Project Gutenberg.