Note: This document is inspired by the Trope Talk video of the same name by Overly Sarcastic Productions. I highly recommend watching that video before reading this doc. In fact, you should watch some of their other videos too. They're all great!
'The Hero's Journey' as a codified concept was initially coined by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book, "The Hero with a Thousand Faces". After examining a large number of stories and myths from various cultures around the world, Campbell analysed the common threads he recognized and came to the conclusion that he had identified the fundamental components of an archetypal hero's journey.
The idea is that this formula, this 'monomyth' as he confidently calls it, covers everything from Gilgamesh to the Buddha, all the way up to modern day and can be identified in a large number of stories in-between. Now while it's cool that so many stories have shared common threads- (Which you may note, is the definition of a trope in the first place) -Campbell went a little overboard on trying to apply the rule to absolutely EVERYTHING in assert that it was the only way hero stories can be told. But, of course, no trope is omnipotent, and it's impossible to come to one formula for how all stories since forever have been written.
For our purposes, let's take a less cavalier approach. 'The Hero's Journey' is not a trope that all stories do or should follow as a strict formula, but rather the trope works best when it serves as a lens through which to view and analyse a story.
Think of it as a more detailed version of a three-act structure. There's no mandate that anyone has to write that way, but knowing about it and understanding how it works lets you analyse the story from this perspective and potentially identify interesting story components you might have otherwise overlooked. And also, like all lenses, you need to make sure that you're not using it to view stuff that doesn't fit.
Not all stories are hero's journeys, and in some cases, looking at a story through the lens of a hero's journey will obscure your view of the parts of the story that don't easily fall into its categories. Trope responsibly, folks!
So before the hero's journey was the thing that all the cool heroes are allegedly doing, the term for the general 'leave the ordinary world to have an adventure' myth was 'the Medicine Journey'. A concept observed in worldwide examples of shamanism by University of Chicago professor, Mircea Eliade, who wrote a few books on the subject. The medicine journey serves as a structural foundation of the hero's journey, with all the other bits basically added in by Campbell for specificity later.
The basic structure of the medicine journey is the following:
A problem exists for which there is no solution within our ordinary understanding of the world. (Like our starting culture)
So, the protagonist must travel elsewhere to find the solution.
And eventually, they return with the solution to the problem!
For instance, the Journey to the West is a medicine journey where the problem is evil and suffering and the solution is Enlightenment. The West being the 'elsewhere' Tripitaka and friends have to travel to.
So the hero's journey heavily reflects that original structure of leave, find solution, come back. So Campbell's trope takes the three-part structure of:
Departure- Where the hero leaves the familiar world.
Initiation- Where the hero navigates the unfamiliar world, otherwise known as 'the world of adventure'.
Return- Where the hero, well, returns to the familiar world.
Usually bringing along the stuff they went to the unfamiliar world for in the first place. Otherwise, you'll...have a problem. Campbell's first major alteration to this trope was to install 'the hero' archetype as the protagonist. The medicine journey could have any type of protagonist whatsoever with literally zero caveats. It could be a group, a child, a squishy human monk with his four monster friends, you name it! By contrast, 'hero' is a much narrower characterisation and it comes with a decent amount of narrative baggage too. So we can already see how Campbell was starting to narrow it in here.
From there, Campbell developed a highly specific and detailed model of the fundamental hero's journey. Adding a large number of secondary story elements he observed frequently augmenting the general medicine journey structure. He was also using it to try and make sweeping assessments of humanity as a whole (which is never a good sign in literary analysis).
The problem is that the trope as he outlined it, was way too specific and didn't really apply to all that many things. So as a result, it isn't all that useful, even as an analytical tool. Unless you're willing to flagrantly abuse and squish around the text you're trying to analyze to fit it exactly. (Which, I highly advise against.)
So since then, a lot of people have made their own versions of the model, to the point where no two sources of it will fully agree with one another. Stripping away a lot of the faff to make it more inclusive and more useful to understand. The general rule of thumb nowadays, is that a lot of stories fit some of the components of the hero's journey. But it's meant to be flexible and there shouldn't be pressure to force a story to fit it. Again, it's not a recipe, it's there to help us understand story structure.
A lot of writers have serious beef with this trope when taken as a mandate because their critics tell them their story needs to fit the hero's journey. Which is as needlessly annoying as any "Oh man, you got to do this trope!" complaint. So we got to tread carefully.
Alright, so with the origins and several disclaimers out of the way, here is the modern consensus of what approximately a hero's journey looks like.
Stage 1 is the Ordinary World. This is the hero's starting point. It's usually familiar to the audience and is definitely familiar to the hero. The purpose of the ordinary world is to give us a 'status quo' to start from, and to get your audience personally invested in the comfort the ordinary world provides so the impact of leaving is strengthened later on. As an optional bonus, your hero can be comfortable with their life here, but really yearning for something more, foreshadowing the inevitable onset of the plot.
Next, they get the Call to Adventure, where the hero learns they might need to do something out of the ordinary in order to save their familiar world. This stage is sometimes accompanied by a mentor character, your Gandalfs and Obi-Wans. But sometimes, they show up later to guide the hero through the unfamiliar world instead. This part is identifiable in the original medicine journey structure as the moment your protagonist realises there's a problem that they can't solve internally.
The next step, the Refusal of the Call, is where the hero doesn't want to go on an adventure, and is narratively punished for this. Typically, their ordinary world is damaged in some way as a result of their refusal to act, so the hero then recognizes that they need to go on the journey, even if it's still semi-reluctant. If you have a gruff but fair father figure in your ordinary world, the narrative punishment is usually this dude getting Uncle Ben'd. The refusal is actually semi-optional even in this structure, because sometimes, heroes are all about adventure and jump at the opportunity instead. Again, it's flexible.
Stage Four is when the hero 'Crosses the First Threshold' into the unfamiliar world, and the story really gets going! Here, the hero makes a conscious and irreversible decision to go on the adventure and crosses through some physical threshold that signifies that. Sometimes there are threshold guardians to test the hero, but that's optional. If you're dealing with something like an urban fantasy where the natural world is the world of adventure, the first threshold is usually where the hero gains the power to see the more adventurous underside of the ordinary world, or is introduced to the secret world and has the urban fantasy rules explained to them.
In the next step, the Realm of Adventure, the hero learns how to navigate a world totally different from the ordinary world they started in. Sometimes, this involves nifty loot, friends and allies, convenient mentors, etc. This is usually a very large portion of the story because it's fun and that's what we're all here for! Also sometimes, this part of the story has the hero find or at least figure out the solution to the initial problem that they're here to solve, making the problem getting the solution back to the ordinary world.
Okay, so this next stage is often the most misunderstood. In a lot of cases, it's shoehorned in right before or even during the final fight with the Big Bad, which really doesn't do it justice. This section is usually called the 'Belly of the Whale', named after that very moment in the story of Jonah. It's where the hero descends into an abyss or in one way or another 'goes down' and undergoes a psychological trial during their darkest hour. In the classical Greek and Roman tradition, this part of the story is known as the 'Kathabasis'. Literally 'going down' and usually constitutes a trip to the Underworld. Here, the physical symbolism of descent is meant to clue the reader in to what's going on thematically inside the hero's head. Anyway, here, the hero has to face and overcome their inner demons, and they emerge as a stronger and better person for it. Now to be clear, the hero doesn't need to be in any physical danger for this portion of the story to be effective. And it can be even more effective when the danger is explicitly coming from inside the hero instead. It's essentially the mental internal climax of the story, and it prepares the hero for the trials to come. Sometimes this is phrased as rebirth, since the hero is different when they emerge from the whale. (But I personally find that this implies too much of a physical component, which just gets confusing…) The key purpose of this stage is that the hero undergoes character development. In any case, this is a major turning point in a hero's journey and usually marks the point where the hero is fully committed to the adventure and prepared for the dangers ahead.
Stage Seven is the Road of Trials, the path out of the belly of the whale. Usually this part coincides with the appearance of a lot of tests, allies and enemies. This usually includes a temptation to 'leave your quest' test where the hero is tempted to abandon their journey. Campbell's version calls this 'the woman as temptress' and gives it an entire section and since that notion is more than a little antiquated, most people agree that any form of temptation, be it money, power, lust, or even just a good night's sleep will do the trick. The road of trials is also frequently a large part of the story because again, it's fun! And it's also really cool because since the hero has escaped the abyss, you get to see your hero as a full hero with their act together now! Stages 5 through 7 can be seen as one contiguous act, since it's usually quite long and makes up most of the meat of the actual adventuring. Your hero's have wacky trials in Adventureland! What more do you need?
The next stage is the Pre-Showdown Breather, where you're coming up on the final confrontation against the physical or metaphorical Big Bad, so your hero or heroes take a quiet moment to reminisce. This one is also optional because sometimes you just straight-up don't get that minute to breathe. Such is life. This gives the writer the chance to show off the humanity of the characters involved, which actually exposes some of the difficulties caused by the hero's journey. Since, ideally, you don't need a designated chapter to remind your readers that these characters are fully developed characters. Usually you want that to be on full display for most of the story, but the hero's journey is a plot driven structure which can easily supersede the unique characterization of the characters involved.
The next stage is the Climax of the story, and there are three ways to tackle it. The Final Showdown, the Apotheosis, and the Ultimate Boon. And most stories will put two or more of these together in some capacity because that just gives you more options. The most standard version of this is the Final Showdown, where the hero fights an overwhelmingly powerful enemy and the hero then defeats the Big Bad, frequently through some form of self-sacrifice. In the Apotheosis, which is Greek for 'the elevation to godhood', the hero comes to view the world in a radically different way due to some revelation or received knowledge. Either that or they get a new power. Finally, there's the Ultimate Boon, where the hero attains their final reward, which they have been seeking all along. Sometimes, there's a final temptation to overcome, but again, that's optional. In a lot of our media today, the climax to an adventure story almost always includes some big fight, but there are a lot of ways to go about writing a narrative climax that get brushed aside because honestly, they're just more difficult and people are lazy. But their rarity makes reading a good non-fight climax more rewarding. What kind of climax your story ultimately has depends in large part on what kind of story you're trying to tell and what you want your readers to see as valuable. Whether that's a heightened knowledge of the world, victory over the forces of evil, or some gift that will make the ordinary world a better place, is all up to you.
After the Climax, we get stages 10 through 12, which all happen in fairly quick succession. The first of which is The Return, where the hero's all done with the adventure and needs to start heading home. This can be a high-octane chase or a slow, sedate and contemplative journey back. Next, the hero Crosses the Return Threshold, and makes it back into the ordinary world. Lastly, there's the Final Reward, the hero's happy ending. Here, the hero is back in the ordinary world, and not only is the hero a stronger and better person from their journey, but the world itself has usually been improved in some way as well. This sometimes gets coded as the hero returning with an elixir, which of course is taken directly from the medicine journey. Where this is the part where the protagonists return to the world with the solution to the problem that sent them on the journey in the first place.
So, that's pretty much the Hero's Journey. And while I doubt that there are too many stories that tick all the checkboxes, I'm sure you recognized a few of these stages from at least a handful of stories. It's not a one-size-fits-all guide to how to write the perfect story, because if you wrote a story that exactly follows this, it would feel ridiculously generic. But there are a lot of useful components to be found here, if we look at the stages in isolation.
For example, the Ordinary World is super useful because it establishes a comfortable status quo that your audience and hero will want to return to. When that world is threatened, you can discuss the visceral discomfort of a disrupted status quo and a story that takes place in that zone of discomfort will be by necessity, uncomfortable by your audience, who will be waiting with bated breath for things to be fixed! Also because you establish it as comfortable and familiar for your hero, your audience will potentially empathise with this and feel similarly driven to protect it when it comes under fire.
The Refusal of the Call is useful because it addresses the fact that most adventures ARE dangerous and scary! See, most real-life endeavors or adventures like activism, public performance or just anything where it feels like you have stuff to lose are frequently undesirable until and unless they become highly personal to the active party. So the feeling of being pulled between the desire to do the right thing and the fear of possible consequences is relatable for most of your audience. Overall, the stage establishes that your character isn't just a vehicle for the plot and isn't necessarily a willing participant in your story. But note the stages aren't always necessary and can sometimes feel like a disingenuous token protest. And "Oh, I couldn't possibly…" from the hero before the plot really gets going.
The Realm of Adventure has one major thing going for it: It's different! That's a very useful starting point! And because you establish that your hero starts in a familiar Ordinary World, you can show off this new, fancy world to your audience as much as you like, since they'll be just as clueless about it as your heroes will be. You can display your world building for all to see, which is convenient if you're a specially enthusiastic world builder. This works as a contrast with the ordinary world and can't function without it. Since without the Ordinary World, the Realm of Adventure is just...a world. Establishing its difference from the norm lets you explore it fully without this feeling like a contrived info dump.
The Belly of the Whale is interesting because challenging your heroes is good. Doing that physically is fine, but challenging them mentally is frequently more interesting, usually because it has a more uncertain outcome. From a meta perspective, most heroes can't really afford to lose a physical fight, if death's a possible outcome. But your heroes can absolutely fail a mental trial. The only consequences are their mental health and personal well-being! *cough-cough* Ahem, sorry… Got caught in the moment. But that means angst, angst, ANGST, as well as tons of opportunities for character development. Your hero finally emerges from the Belly of the Whale when they finally succeeded in their mental tasks. But this doesn't necessarily have to be easy or quick and they can even have adventures when they're still super messed up. Sometimes, the Belly of the Whale is more of a state of mind than a physical location.
The Pre-Showdown Banter lets your heroes chill a bit, which is good because we always have to remember that these characters are human. Again, it's easy to get caught up in the story you want to tell on the adventure you want to write, but if it's nonstop action, your characters and your audience will get exhausted. Pacing is super important! Let your heroes take a minute to recuperate, let your audience hit the bathrooms, or take a nap, or something… All emphasis is no emphasis. The high octane adventurer loses its impact if you never have the slow subtle stages. It also doesn't really have to happen right before the big showdown. Breathers can honestly happen almost anywhere. This whole thing is more of a structural reminder that pacing really matters.
For the Return/Final Reward, your adventure ends eventually and while not all stories end back where they started, there's a melancholic victory in doing it that way. Your hero's home, but is it home anymore? Consider the ending of the Lord of the Rings. They return to the Shire, but they can never go back to who they were before the adventure. For Merry and Pippin, that's good. They're stronger, taller, more badass. For Sam, he's braver and can properly get his reward of raising a family. But for Frodo, the Shire can never be his home again. He can only get the rest he deserves by leaving Middle Earth entirely, because… you can't always go home again… It's a good way to give your story a bittersweet ending as well as explore what an ending should be like. Also, does their story NEED to end? Maybe it's only the first of many adventures! Maybe even though they finished the adventure, they now know they can't sit idly by when something goes wrong. Maybe when they return, the adventure continues! 'The End' doesn't have to be the end.
And for something extra to think about, the 'hero' is a vague archetype but it still has fairly rigid components. When really, the hero of the story can be almost anyone. Campbell implies a strict hero character, but really the only trait that the hero needs in the structure is that they're usually naive when it comes to the unfamiliar world, which is reasonable. Look no further than Overly Sarcastic Productions' Trope Talk videos or any further trope talk sections I might do to see much, much more about how you can really play with your hero character!
So, there's really nothing wrong with this trope intrinsically as it helps us understand a multitude of excellent stories from all over the world, but it shouldn't GUIDE your writing on its own. It's similar to the Rule of Three (which I'll cover another time), in that it's more of a recurring concept than a trope people deliberately invoke. But in another similar vein to the Rule of Three, people tend to think it's more structurally vital than it really needs to be.
You can write an excellent hero story without needing to use the hero's journey model. Just look at Captain America, which has exactly ZERO elements of the classic hero's journey. Tellingly, most modern versions of this model explicitly state that any number of component parts can and usually are excluded from the final product. Which is great, because with this (metaphorical) generator that we hooked to Campbell's grave, we can power the entire Eastern Seaboard with how fast he's spinning!
Ultimately, it's good to be aware of it, and there's a lot of useful stuff included in it. Plus, once you know how to look for it, much like the Rule of Three, it is everywhere! But it doesn't dictate how you HAVE to write and it's nowhere near universal. So don't do anything for the sake of just doing it, do it if it helps you tell YOUR story.
Thank you so much for listening. If you have any requests, let me know in the comments, and I hope you enjoyed.