Christopher Vogler Venice, California February 26, 2007
A book goes out like a wave rolling over the surface of the sea. Ideas radiate from the authors mind and collide with other minds, triggering new waves that return to the author. These generate further thoughts and emanations, and so it goes. The concepts described in The Writer's Journey have radiated and are now echoing back interesting challenges and criticisms as well as sympathetic vibrations. This is my report on the waves that have washed back over me from publication of the book, and on the new waves I send back in response.
In this book I described the set of concepts known as "The Hero's Journey," drawn from the depth psychology of Carl G. Jung and the mythic studies of Joseph Campbell. I tried to relate those ideas to contemporary storytelling, hoping to create a writer's guide to these valuable gifts from our innermost selves and our most distant past. I came looking for the design principles of storytelling, but on the road I found something more: a set of principles for living. I came to believe that the Hero's Journey is nothing less than a handbook for life, a complete instruction manual in the art of being human.
The Hero's Journey is not an invention, but an observation. It is a recognition of a beautiful design, a set of principles that govern the conduct of life and the world of storytelling the way physics and chemistry govern the physical world. It's difficult to avoid the sensation that the Hero's Journey exists somewhere, somehow, as an eternal reality, a Platonic ideal form, a divine model. From this model, infinite and highly varied copies can be produced, each resonating with the essential spirit of the form.
The Hero's Journey is a pattern that seems to extend in many dimensions, describing more than one reality. It accurately describes, among other things, the process of making a journey, the necessary working parts of a story, the joys and despairs of being a writer, and the passage of a soul through life.
A book that explores such a pattern naturally partakes of this multi—dimensional quality. The Writer's Journey was intended as a practical guidebook for writers, but can also be read as a guide to the life lessons that have been carefully built into the stories of all times. Some people have even used it as a kind of travel guide, predicting the inevitable ups and downs of making a physical journey.
A certain number of people say the book has affected them on a level that may have nothing to do with the business of telling a story or writing a script. In the description of the Hero's Journey they might have picked up some insight about their own lives, some useful metaphor or way of looking at things, some language or principle that defines their problem and suggests a way out of it. They recognize their own problems in the ordeals of the mythic and literary heroes, and are reassured by the stories that give them abundant, time-tested strategies for survival, success, and happiness.
Other people find validation of their own observations in the book. From time to time I meet people who know the Hero's Journey well although they may never have heard it called by that name. When they read about it or hear it described, they experience the pleasurable shock of recognition as the patterns resonate with what they've seen in stories and in their own lives. I had the same reaction when I first encountered these concepts in Campbell's book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and heard him speak about them with passion. Campbell himself felt it when he first heard his mentor, Heinrich Zimmer, speak about mythology. In Zimmer he recognized a shared attitude about myths — that they are not abstract theories or the quaint beliefs of ancient peoples, but practical models for understanding how to live.
A PRACTICAL GUIDE
The original intent of this book was to make an accessible, down-to-earth writing manual from these high-flying mythic elements. In that practical spirit, I am gratified to hear from so many readers that the book can be a useful writing guide. Professional writers as well as novices and students report that it has been an effective design tool, validating their instincts and providing new concepts and principles to apply to their stories. Movie and television executives, producers, and directors have told me the book influenced their projects and helped them solve story problems. Novelists, playwrights, actors, and writing teachers have put the ideas to use in their work.
Happily, the book has won acceptance as one of the standard Hollywood guidebooks for the screenwriting craft. Spy magazine called it "the new industry Bible." Through the various international editions (U.K., German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Icelandic, etc.) it has radiated to greater Hollywood, the world community of storytellers. Filmmakers and students from many countries have reported their interest in the Hero's Journey idea and their appreciation for the book as a practical guide for designing and troubleshooting stories.
The Writer's Journey, meanwhile, has been put to work in many ways, not only by writers in many forms and genres, but by teachers, psychologists, advertising executives, prison counselors, video game designers, and scholars of myth and pop culture.
I am convinced the principles of the Hero's Journey have had a deep influence over the shaping of stories in the past and will reach even deeper in the future as more storytellers become consciously aware of them. Joseph Campbell's great accomplishment was to articulate clearly something that had been there all along — the life principles embedded in the structure of stories. He wrote down the unwritten rules of storytelling, and that seems to be stimulating authors to challenge, test, and embellish the Hero's Journey. I see signs that writers are playing with the ideas and even introducing "Campbellian" language and terms into their dramas.
The conscious awareness of its patterns may be a mixed blessing, for it's easy to generate thoughtless cliches and stereotypes from this matrix. The self-conscious, heavy-handed use of this model can be boring and predictable. But if writers absorb its ideas and re-create them with fresh insights and surprising combinations, they can make amazing new forms and original designs from the ancient, immutable parts.
QUESTIONS AND CRITICISMS
"It takes a great enemy to make a great airplane ."
— Air Force saying
Inevitably, aspects of the book have been questioned or criticized. I welcome this as a sign the ideas are worthy of argument. I'm sure I've learned more from the challenges than from the positive feedback. Writing a book may be, as the historian Paul Johnson says, "the only way to study a subject systematically, purposefully and retentively." Harvesting the response, both positive and negative, is part of that study.
Since the book came out in 1993 I have continued to work in the story end of the movie business, at Disney, Fox, and Paramount. I've had the chance to try out the Hero's Journey concepts with the big toys. I saw where it works but also where my understanding of it fell short and needed to be adjusted. My beliefs about what makes a good story were tested in the toughest arenas on earth — Hollywood story conferences and the world marketplace — and I hope my understanding has grown from the objections, doubts, and questions of my esteemed colleagues, and from the reaction of the audience.