The Hero's Journey

All of us are used to the tired, boring mountain of a plot diagram. The following should look all too familiar:

It's time to UPGRADE that basic plot diagram. Joseph Campbell wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949 after appearing on PBS with compelling lectures of the same topic: ALL stories follow the basic plot line with similar characters and events. He went on to label these steps and archetypal characters to create what we now refer to as "The Hero's Journey."

Chris Vogle summarizes Campbell's theory in this paragraph: "Campbell is a mythographer -- he writes about myths. What he discovered in his study of world myths is that THEY ARE ALL BASICALLY THE SAME STORY -- retold endlessly in infinite variation. He discovered that all story-telling, consciously or not, follows the ancient patterns of myth, and that all stories, from the crudest jokes to the highest flights of literature, can be understood in terms of the 'HERO MYTH;' the 'MONOMYTH' whose principles he lays out in the book."

Here is a detailed look at Campbell's Hero's Journey.

And now, let's apply Campbell's terminology to an inverted plot diagram. (Initiation=Rising Action; The Pit=Climax; etc).

We are going to identify these steps in various fiction literature, so keep this chart handy. There are also TONS of resources about the Hero's Journey on the interwebs, so be sure to search Google, Pinterest, Hollywood news, and plenty of college websites to learn and explore more!

Check out the following lesson, "The Hero's Journey: Archetypes and Characters!"