And so the Hero's Journey ends, or at least rests for a while, for the journey of life and the adventure of story never really end. The hero and the audience bring back the Elixir from the current adventure, but the quest to integrate the lessons goes on. It's for each of us to say what the Elixir is — wisdom, experience, money, love, fame, or the thrill of a lifetime. But a good story, like a good journey, leaves us with an Elixir that changes us, makes us more aware, more alive, more human, more whole, more a part of everything that is. The circle of the Hero's Journey is complete.
QUESTIONING THE JOURNEY
1. What is the Elixir of Basic Instinct? Big? City Slickers? Fatal Attraction? Dances with Wolves?
2. What is the Elixir your hero brings back from the experience? Is it kept to herself or is it shared?
3. Does your story go on too long after the main event or climax is over? What would be the effect of simply cutting it off after the climax? How much denouement do you need to satisfy the audience?
4. In what ways has the hero gradually taken more responsibility in the course of the story? Is the Return a point of taking greatest responsibility?
5. Who is the hero of the story now? Has your story changed heroes, or have characters risen to be heroes? Who turned out to be a disappointment? Are there any surprises in the final outcome?
6. Is your story worth telling? Has enough been learned to make the effort worthwhile?
7. Where are you in your own Hero's Journey? What is the Elixir you hope to bring back?
Now that we have come to the end of the Road of Heroes, it may be useful to examine how this model works in some representative film stories. I have chosen Titanic, Pulp Fiction, The Lion King, and The Full Monty as movies that made creative, entertaining use of the Hero's Journey archetypes and structures. I also want to say a few words about the Star Wars saga, which has been much a part of the development of the Hero's Journey idea.
Analyzing these films and tracing the Hero's Journey in them has been a rewarding exercise, revealing some story flaws but also surprising levels of meaning and poetic connection. I strongly recommend you try this for yourself on a movie, novel or story of your own. This material pays back a rich reward when you apply it to a story or a life situation. However, before presenting these analyzes, a few warnings and guidelines are in order.
CAVEAT, SCRIPTOR
First, Caveat Scriptor! (Let the writer beware!) The Hero's Journey model is a guideline. It's not a cookbook recipe or a mathematical formula to be applied rigidly to every story. To be effective, a story doesn't have to concur with this or any other school, paradigm, or method of analysis. The ultimate measure of a story's success or excellence is not its compliance with any established patterns, but its lasting popularity and effect on the audience. To force a story to conform to a structural model is putting the cart before the horse.
It's possible to write good stories that don't exhibit every feature of the Hero's Journey; in fact, it's better if they don't. People love to see familiar conventions and expectations defied creatively. A story can break all the "rules" and yet still touch universal human emotions.
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION
Remember: The needs of the story dictate its structure. Form follows function. Your beliefs and priorities, along with the characters, themes, style, tone, and mood you are trying to get across, will determine the shape and design of the plot. Structure will also be influenced by the audience, and the time and place in which the story is being told.
The forms of stories change with the needs of the audience. New story types with different rhythms will continue to be created. For instance, thanks to television and MTV styles of cutting, the attention span of the world audience is shorter these days and its sophistication is greater than ever before. Writers can build faster-moving stories and can assume the audience will be able to handle twists and shortcuts in familiar structures.
New terms are being created every day and new observations about story are being made every time one is written. The Hero's Journey is only a guideline, a starting point for hammering out your own story language and rules of thumb.
CHOOSE YOUR METAPHOR
The pattern of the Hero's Journey is but one metaphor for what goes on in a story or a human life. I have used hunting, college classes, and human sexual response as metaphors to help explain the pattern I see in story, but these are far from the only possibilities. Work out a different metaphor or several of them, if it helps you understand storytelling better. You might find it useful to compare a story to a baseball game, with nine innings instead of twelve stages, and terms like "Seventh-Inning Stretch" instead of Seizing the Sword. You might decide the process of sailing a boat, baking bread, rafting a river, driving a car, or carving a statue makes a more meaningful comparison to telling a story. Sometimes a combination of metaphors is needed to illuminate different facets of the human journey.
The stages, terms, and ideas of the Hero's Journey can be used as a design template for stories, or as a means of troubleshooting a story so long as you don't follow these guidelines too rigidly. It's probably best to acquaint yourself with the Hero's Journey ideas and then forget about them as you sit down to write. If you get lost, refer to the metaphor as you would check a map on a journey. But don't mistake the map for the journey. You don't drive with a map pasted to your windshield. You consult it before setting out or when you get disoriented. The joy of a journey is not reading or following a map, but exploring unknown places and wandering off the map now and then. It's only by getting creatively lost, beyond the boundaries of tradition, that new discoveries can be made.
DESIGN TEMPLATE
You may want to experiment with the Hero's Journey as an outline for plotting a new story or troubleshooting one in the works. In Disney Animation we have used the Hero's Journey model to tighten up storylines, pinpoint problems, and lay out structures. Hundreds of writers have told me they plotted their screenplays, romance novels, or TV sitcom episodes using the Hero's Journey and the guidance of mythology.
Some people begin to plot a movie or novel by writing the twelve stages of the journey on twelve index cards. If you already know some of the major scenes and turning points, write these down where you think they match up with the twelve stages. In this way you begin to map out your story by filling in the gaps in your knowledge of the characters and what happens to them. Use the ideas of the Hero's Journey to ask questions about your characters: What are the Ordinary and Special Worlds for these people? What is my hero's Call to Adventure? How is fear expressed in Refusal? Is it overcome by Meeting with a Mentor? What is the First Threshold my hero has to cross? And so on. Before long the gaps fill and you can progress to chart Hero's Journeys for all the characters and subplots until the complete design is worked out.
You may find that a certain scene matches with the function of one of the stages, but it comes at what seems to be the "wrong" point in the Hero's Journey model. In your story a Mentor might be needed to present a Call and Refusal in Act Two or Three instead of Act One, as the Hero's Journey model appears to indicate. Don't worry about this — put in the scene wherever it seems right to you. The model only shows the most likely place for an event to occur.
Any element of the Hero's Journey can appear at any point in a story. Dances with Wolves begins with a hero's Ordeal or Resurrection that you usually expect to see at the midpoint or end of a Hero's Journey, and yet the story works. All stories are composed of elements of the Hero's Journey, but the units can be arranged in almost any order to serve the needs of your particular story.