The Hero's Journey

This book is like having the smartest person in the story meeting come home with you and whisper what to do in your ear as you write a screenplay. Insight for insight, step for step, Chris Vogler takes us through the process of connecting theme to story and making a script come alive. - Lynda Obst

The Call to Adventure is a process of selection. An unstable situation arises in a society and someone volunteers or is chosen to take responsibility.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays the drifter corner of the triangle in Titanic. The secret of his remarkable attractive powers may be that he projects the archetypal mask of the sensitive young man, displaying both masculine action and feminine sensitivity.

This is a book about the stories we write, and perhaps more importantly, the stories we live. It is the most influential work I have yet encountered on the art, nature, and the very purpose of storytelling. - Bruce Joel Rubin

The Hero's Journey is nothing less than a handbook for life, a complete instruction manual in the art of being human.

The conscious awareness of its patterns may be a mixed blessing, for it's easy to generate thoughtless clichés and stereotypes from this matrix.

Artists who operate on the principle of rejecting all form are themselves dependent on form.

The Hero's Journey language is clearly becoming part of the storytelling common knowledge and its principles have been used consciously to create hugely popular films.

The pattern of the Hero's Journey is universal, occurring in every culture, in every time. It is as infinitely varied as the human race itself and yet its basic form remains constant.

Good stories make you feel you've been through a satisfying, complete experience. You've cried or laughed or both. You finish the story feeling you've learned something about life or about yourself.

Understanding these elements and their use in modern writing is the object of our quest. Used wisely, these ancient tools of the storytellers craft still have tremendous power to heal our people and make the world a better place.

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

Stories built on the model of the Hero's Journey have an appeal that can be felt by everyone, because they well up from a universal source in the shared unconscious and reflect universal concerns.

The protagonist of every story is the hero of a journey, even if the path leads only into his own mind or into the realm of relationships.

The hero, having overcome fear, has decided to confront the problem and take action. She is now committed to the journey and there's no turning back.

The Hero's Journey is a skeletal framework that should be fleshed out with the details and surprises of the individual story.

The Hero archetype represents the ego's search for identity and wholeness.

People commonly think of Heroes as strong or brave, but these qualities are secondary to sacrifice — the True mark of a Hero.

An unheroic character can grow to be heroic.

Interesting flaws humanize a character. We can recognize bits of ourselves in a Hero who is challenged to overcome inner doubts, errors in thinking, guilt or trauma from the past, or fear of the future.

Mentors represent the Self, the god within us, the aspect of personality that is connected with all things.

Mentors provide heroes with motivation, inspiration, guidance, training, and gifts for the journey. Every hero is guided by something, and a story without some acknowledgement of this energy is incomplete.

Threshold Guardians have the important psychological function of announcing the need for change. Something deep inside us knows when we are ready to change and sends us a messenger.

Heralds provide motivation, offer the hero a challenge, and get the story rolling. They alert the hero (and the audience) that change and adventure are coming.

Shapeshifters change appearance or mood, and are difficult for the hero and the audience to pin down. They may mislead the hero or keep her guessing, and their loyalty or sincerity is often in question.

The Shapeshifter archetype is also a catalyst for change, a symbol of the psychological urge to transform.

The function of the Shadow in drama is to challenge the hero and give her a worthy opponent in the struggle.

Heroes on their journeys may need someone to travel with them, an Ally who can serve a variety of necessary functions, such as companion, sparring partner, conscience, or comic relief.

A beginning is, indeed, a delicate time.

The opening moments are a powerful opportunity to set the tone and create an impression.

The mythological approach to story boils down to using metaphors or comparisons to get across your feelings about life.

In storytelling, getting the audience a little off-base and upsetting their normal perceptions can put them into a receptive mood.

Its a good idea for writers to make the Ordinary World as different as possible from the Special World, so audience and hero will experience a dramatic change when the threshold is finally crossed.

Every well-rounded hero has a trace of this tragic flaw, some weakness or fault that makes him thoroughly human and real. Perfect, flawless heroes aren't very interesting, and are hard to relate to.

The Ordinary World is the most appropriate place to deal with exposition and backstory. Backstory is all the relevant information about a character's history and background — what got her to the situation at the beginning of the story.

In a good story, everything is related somehow to the theme, and the Ordinary World is the place to make the first statement of the main idea.

Persistent Refusal of the Call can be disastrous. In the Bible, Lot's wife is turned to a pillar of salt for denying God's Call to leave her home in Sodom and never look back.

We must fully immerse ourselves in the world to find the material for our art. But we must also at times withdraw from the world, going alone to actually make the art.

Artists sometimes ride through life like Odysseus lashed to the mast, with all senses deeply experiencing the song of life, but also voluntarily bound to the ship of their art.

Mentors can be regarded as heroes who have become experienced enough to teach others. They have been down the Road of Heroes one or more times, and they have acquired knowledge and skill which can be passed on.

Mentors spring up in amazing variety and frequency because they are so useful to storytellers. They reflect the reality that we all have to learn the lessons of life from someone or something.

Threshold Guardians are part of the training of any hero. In Greek myth, the three-headed monster dog Cerberus guards the entrance to the underworld, and many a hero has had to figure out a way past his jaws.

The most important function of this period of adjustment to the Special World is testing. Storytellers use this phase to test the hero, putting her through a series of trials and challenges that are meant to prepare her for greater ordeals ahead.

Heroes, having made the adjustment to the Special World, now go on to seek its heart. They pass into an intermediate region between the border and the very center of the Hero's Journey.

The phase of Tests, Allies, and Enemies in stories is useful for 'getting to know you' scenes where the characters get acquainted with each other and the audience learns more about them.

As heroes Approach the Inmost Cave, they should know they are in shaman's territory, on the edge between life and death.

The simple secret of the Ordeal is this: Heroes must die so that they can be reborn. The dramatic movement that audiences enjoy more than any other is death and rebirth.

Heroes don't just visit death and come home. They return changed, transformed. No one can go through an experience at the edge of death without being changed in some way.

People pay good money for a taste of death. Bungee-jumping, skydiving, and terrifying amusement park rides give people the jolt that awakens fuller appreciation of life.

The Ordeal can be defined as the moment the hero faces his greatest fear. For most people this is death, but in many stories it's just whatever the hero is most afraid of: facing up to a phobia, challenging a rival, or roughing out a storm or a political crisis.

In stories with emotional and psychological depth, the Ordeal may bring a moment of mystic marriage within a person, a balancing of opposing inner forces.

The challenging of the older generation by the younger is a timeless drama, and the Supreme Ordeal of standing up to a forbidding parent is as old as Adam and Eve, Oedipus, or King Lear.

Heroes may find that surviving death grants new powers or better perceptions. In the previous chapter we spoke of death's ability to sharpen the perception of life.

Insight might be of a deeper type. Heroes can sometimes experience a profound self-realization after tricking death. They see who they are and how they fit into the scheme of things.

Heroes themselves may experience epiphany. A hero may realize suddenly, after a moment of Supreme Ordeal, that he is the son of a god or a king, a chosen one with special powers.

A new self must be created for a new world. Just as heroes had to shed their old selves to enter the Special World, they now must shed the personality of the journey and build a new one that is suitable for return to the Ordinary World.

One function of Resurrection is to cleanse heroes of the smell of death, yet help them retain the lessons of the ordeal.

Heroes can get surprise assistance, but it's best for the hero to be the one to perform the decisive action; to deliver the death blow to fear or the Shadow; to be active rather than passive, at this of all times.

The Resurrection stage represents a field trial of a hero's new skills, in the real world. It's both a reminder of death and a test of the hero's learning.

A showdown pits hero and villains in an ultimate contest with the highest possible stakes, life and death.

A climax should provide the feeling of catharsis. This Greek word actually means 'vomiting up' or 'purging,' but in English has come to mean a purifying emotional release, or an emotional breakthrough.

No, a hopeful romantic. Her look tells us she is still in some pain, but that she really is all right. She has learned to love herself regardless of whether or not some man loves her, and she has the self-confidence she lacked before.

She tells Dorothy she had the power to return home all along. She didn't tell Dorothy because She wouldn't have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.

Returning with the Elixir is the last test of the hero, which shows if he's mature enough to share the fruits of his quest.

For this is the penalty of failing to return with the Elixir: The hero, or some­ one else, is doomed to repeat the Ordeals until the lesson is learned or the Elixir is brought home to share.

The ultimate measure of a story's success or excellence is not its compliance with any established patterns, but its lasting popu­ larity and effect on the audience.

The story should end with the emotional equivalent of a punctuation mark. A story, like a sentence, can end in only four ways: with a period, an exclamation point, a question mark, or an ellipsis.

As James Cameron said, in a letter to the Los Angeles Times, March 28, 1998, Titanic 'intentionally incorporates universals of human experience and emotion that are timeless — and familiar because they reflect our basic emotional fabric. By dealing in archetypes, the film touches people in all cultures and of all ages.

Certain films, because of surprising box office success or memorable content, become permanent monuments on the cultural landscape. Titanic, like Star Wars, Easy Rider, Close Encounters, and Independence Day, has become such a monument.

Movies of this type are quantum events, breaking through old shells and boundaries, flinging the idea of a movie to a whole new level. These quantum-event films capture something that resonates in many, many people. They must express some nearly universal emotion or satisfy a widely shared wish.

With a little cry of final dramatic CLIMAX, Old Rose releases it into the water where, like Jack, it spirals down into mystery, a last SACRIFICE that says her experience and memories are more important than any physical possession.

Titanic is more hopeful, less cynical than The Ship of Fools, suggesting that a few can transcend their foolishness and victimization to live full, meaningful lives.

Titanic plays on fears that have a high degree of identification for the audience — the universal fear of heights, fear of being trapped and imprisoned, fear of drown­ ing in a bottomless sea, fear of fire and explosion, fear of loneliness and isolation.

The movie offers an imaginable horror. It could happen to anyone. Since it provides a complete spectrum of the society of its time, any viewer can find an identity there, as a well-off member of the ruling class, as a worker, as an immigrant, as a dreamer, as a lover.

In the tradition of the Hero's Journey, Titanic explores death but makes the case for the full embrace of life.

The challenge of growing up and claiming your rightful place in the world is a classic Hero's Journey motif that naturally struck something deep in many people.

In the postmodern universe, everything is relative, and moral values are the most relative of all.

Pulp Fiction reflects the postmodern condition in both style and content.

It's enough that it's something of importance to the characters, something worth the risk of dying for. It's a Holy Grail or a Golden Fleece, a symbol of all the desires that draw heroes into quests.

They are trying to work out an ethical system between them, and are concerned about the limits of honor and duty.

The chance encounter with Butch is a TEST which shows a flaw in Vincent, a lack of respect for his elders.

He has truly been through a moral RESURRECTION and transformation. Vincent doesn't value any of this and gets up to go to the bathroom, the same action that ultimately gets him killed.

The Full Monty connected with audiences because of its infectious good humor and its upbeat music and dance, which combined effectively with the realistic settings and believable, down-to-earth characters.

The master plan for organizing this huge canvas of six feature films seems to reflect a polarized view of the universe and of the hero myth itself, allowing full exploration of the dark and light possibilities of the heroic model.

Stories have healing power, that they can help us deal with difficult emotional situations by giving us examples of human behavior, perhaps similar in some way to the struggles we are going through at some stage of life, and which might inspire us to try a different strategy for living.

I believe stories are orientation devices, functioning like compasses and maps to allow us to feel oriented, centered, connected, more conscious, more aware of our identities and responsibilities and our relationship to the rest of the world.

We writers share in the godlike power of the shamans. We not only travel to other worlds but create them out of space and time. When we write, we truly travel to these worlds of our imagination.

Re-experiencing the story of 'Rumpelstiltskin' as an adult, I was struck by how instantaneously the girl's tears of despair summoned the little man.

I began to realize that wishing may be an underlying principle of storytelling.

Through the triggering device of wishes, stories seem to like arranging events so that the hero is forced to evolve to a higher level of awareness.

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.

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.

A polarized relationship naturally generates conflict as the characters at two contrasting extremes explore and challenge each other's boundaries, concepts of the world, and strategies for living. We find this endlessly fascinating.

A polarized relationship of opposites may temporarily reach a state of equilibrium or balance, but most polarized systems don't stay balanced for very long. Energy is always flowing, creating change.

Under the stimulus of conflict with a polarized opposite, a character will begin to oscillate, to swing like a pendulum, further away from the opposite at times, closer at other times.

Complete and permanent reversals of polarity are rare in stories and in life. If a story has done its work, the character has experimented with something unfamiliar, realized that some special quality was lacking, and incorporated some aspect of that quality into his or her life.

Polarities in stories form a conceptual framework with which to organize ideas and energy, building up positive and negative charges around selected characters, words, and concepts.

Polarization without shading or the possibility of change would quickly become boring, just two people shouting at each other. The fun is in seeing a tiny seed of the opposite quality coming to life in a polarized character or situation.

Whatever it meant to Aristotle, the word has come to mean something to us: a sudden release of emotions that can be brought about by good entertainment, great art, or probing for psychological insight.

People still need catharsis, and a good story is one of the most reliable and entertaining ways of bringing it about.

In your writing, remember that the purpose of everything you're doing is to about some kind of emotional reaction in your reader or viewer.

When we deal in drama or narrative today, we are building on forty thousand years of tradition and experience.

A shiver of this kind in French is called a 'frisson,' and I noticed the phenomenon when I concentrated hard on working out a story problem, especially when working collaboratively in open discussion with other people.

Stories appeal to the organs at different levels, and there is a hierarchy, an ascending order of emotional development that is reflected in the Indian concept of the chakra system.

Trust the journey. Trust the story. Trust the path. As Dante says, at the beginning of the Inferno, 'In the midst of life's journey I found myself in a dark wood, for the right path was lost.

This book is like having the smartest person in the story meeting come home with you and whisper what to do in your ear as you write a screenplay. Insight for insight, step for step, Chris Vogler takes us through the process of connecting theme to story and making a script come alive." - Lynda Obst, Producer, Sleepless in Seattle, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days; Author, Hello, He Lied

Admit me Chorus to this history.

The Writers Journey is an insightful and even inspirational guide to the craft of story­ telling. An approach to structure that is fresh and contemporary, while respecting our roots in mythology." - Charles Russell, Writer, Director, Producer, Dreamscape, The Mask, Eraser

The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

The Writer's Journey should be on anyone's bookshelf who cares about the art of storytelling at the movies. Not just some theoretical tome filled with development clichés of the day, this book offers sound and practical advice on how to construct a story that works." - David Friendly, Producer, Little Miss Sunshine, Daylight, Courage Under Fire, Out to Sea, My Girl

A beginning is a very delicate time.

Spreading strife is my greatest joy.

Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you. That is how I know you go on. Far across the distance, and spaces between us, you have come to show you go on.

I'm the king of the world!

Love is not passion, desire, or longing. It's patience, commitment, sacrifice, and above all, trust.

VINCENT VEGA AND MARSELLUS WALLACE'S WIFE

REVERSALS OF FORTUNE Reversal of polarity in a story can be the abrupt overturning of a character's fortune, a change of luck or circumstances that switches the prevailing conditions from negative to positive or vice versa.

A polarized relationship, be it a friendship, partnership, alliance, or romance, allows for a full exploration of character as the two people, representing opposite ends of a spectrum of behavior, find their standards and habits intensely challenged by energy that is just the opposite of theirs, perhaps outgoing where theirs is shy and private, or highly organized where their lives are chaotic.

THE OTHER END OF THE SPECTRUM

We're going to stimulate some action, We're gonna get some satisfaction. We're gonna find out what it is all about, After midnight, we're gonna let it all hang out.

The flame would then be passed from person to person, carrying home candles or small oil lamps from which the individual hearth fires could be re-lit to Invigorate the culture.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

If it isn't making at least two organs of my body squirt fluids, it's no good.