Practicing morally imaginative storytelling means scrutinizing the values and messages encrypted in the fiction we produce—but it does not mean passing a “purity test.”
In Marty Di Bergi’s 1984 rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, the titular British heavy-metal band, faced with ebbing popularity and flagging album sales, embarks on a disaster-prone tour of North America in support of its latest release, the critically savaged Smell the Glove. During a stopover at Graceland to pay their respects to the King of Rock and Roll at his gravesite, lead vocalist David St. Hubbins comments, “Well, this is thoroughly depressing.”
To which bandmate and childhood best friend Nigel Tufnel responds, “It really puts perspective on things, though, doesn’t it?”
“Too much. There’s too much fucking perspective now.”
It’s a sentiment to which we can all relate, collectively endowed as we’ve become with a migrainous case of “2020 vision.” At the start of the pandemic, long before we had any sense of what we were in for let alone any perspective on it, I like many essayists felt the urge or need or even the responsibility to say something about it, despite knowing I had no useful or meaningful insight. I netted out with an acknowledgment that the months to come would present a rare Digital Age opportunity for quiet introspection and reflection—one in which we might expand our moral imagination of what’s possible, to invoke the exquisite wisdom of my mentor Al Gore, and perhaps envision a world on the other side appreciably more just, equitable, and sustainable than the one we had before the global shutdown.
Did we ever. Here in the United States, we are now wrestling with issues of economic inequality, structural racism, police brutality, environmental justice, and fair access to affordable housing and healthcare with an awareness and an urgency not seen in generations, and President Joe Biden—responding to the social movements of his times like FDR and LBJ before him—has proposed a host of progressive legislation that matches the visionary, transformative ambition of the New Deal and the Great Society.
With heartening moral imagination (certainly more than this democratic eco-socialist expected from him), Biden is attempting to turn the page on the Randian, neoliberal narrative of the past forty years and write a new chapter in the American story—one founded on an ethos of sympathetic coexistence, not extractive exploitation. With our continued grassroots support and, when necessary, pressure, he might even be the unlikely hero to pull it off, too—our Nixon in China.
As for me? I spent most of the pandemic thinking about narrativity myself. Doing nothing, after all, was a privilege of the privileged, with whom I am obliged to be counted. So, I used the time in self-quarantine to think and to write about the stories we tell, and I arrived at the resolute conclusion that we—the storytellers—need to do a lot better.
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Christopher Vogler’s industry-standard screenwriting instructional The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, here’s an in-depth look at why the time-honored storytelling principles it propounds are existentially endangered in our postnarrative world… and why they’re needed now more than ever.
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell identified the “monomyth”—the universal narrative patterns and Jungian psychological archetypes that provide the shape, structure, and emotional resonance of virtually every story in the Western literary canon.
As it’s more commonly known, this is the “Hero’s Journey,” in which the status quo is disrupted, sending our protagonist on a perilous adventure—physically or emotionally or both—through a funhouse-mirror distortion of their everyday reality (think Marty McFly in 1950s Hill Valley, Dorothy in Oz) in which they encounter Mentors, Shadows, Allies, and Tricksters throughout a series of escalating challenges, culminating in a climactic test from which they finally return to the Ordinary World, ideally a bit wiser for their trouble. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to a given episode of The Big Bang Theory, the Hero’s Journey is the foundational schema of storytelling.
The stages of the Hero’s Journey
The book’s influence on the visionary young filmmakers who came of age studying it was quantum: George Lucas consciously applied Campbell’s theory to the development of Star Wars (1977), as did George Miller to Mad Max (1979), arguably transforming a pair of idiosyncratic, relatively low-budget sci-fi projects into global phenomena that are still begetting sequels over forty years later. After serving Western culture for millennia, in the waning decades of the twentieth century, the Hero’s Journey became the blueprint for the Hollywood blockbuster.
In the 1990s, a story analyst at Disney by the name of Christopher Vogler wrote and circulated a seven-page internal memo titled “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” a screenwriter-friendly crib sheet that was notably used in the development of The Lion King (a classic Hero’s Journey if ever there was one), evolving a few years later into a full-length book of its own: The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of which was published this past summer. The nearly 500-page revised volume is partitioned into four sections:
MAPPING THE JOURNEY: Here Mr. Vogler characterizes the mythic archetypes of the Hero, Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow, Ally, and Trickster.
STAGES OF THE JOURNEY: Each monomythic “beat”—The Call to Adventure, Crossing the First Threshold, Approach to the Inmost Cave, etc.—is given thorough explanation and illustration.
LOOKING BACK ON THE JOURNEY: Using the tools he teaches, Mr. Vogler provides comprehensive analyses of Titanic, Pulp Fiction, The Lion King, The Shape of Water, and Lucas’ six-part Star Wars saga.
THE REST OF THE STORY: ADDITIONAL TOOLS FOR MASTERING THE CRAFT: The appendices are a series of essays on the history, nature, and cultural dynamics of the art and craft of storytelling. After 350 pages of practical technique, Mr. Vogler earns the privilege of indulging a bit of literary theory here, and his insights are fascinating. He devotes an entire chapter to the subject of catharsis, “comparing the emotional effect of a drama with the way the body rids itself of toxins and impurities” (Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 4th ed. [Studio City, California: Michael Wiese Productions, 2020], 420). Stories, in that sense, are medicinal; their alchemical compounds have healing properties—more on this point later.
Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey codifies mythic structure for contemporary storytellers, demonstrating its form, function, and versatility through more accessible terminology than Campbell’s densely academic nomenclature, and by drawing on examples from cinematic touchstones familiar to all: The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Titanic, etc. Like The Hero with a Thousand Faces before it, The Writer’s Journey has become, over the last quarter century, an essential catechism, affecting not merely its own generation of scribes (including yours truly), but the successive storytelling programs that stand on its shoulders, like Save the Cat!
Comparison of Vogler’s Hero’s Journey and Snyder’s “beat sheet”
But why is it essential? If Campbell and Vogler and Blake Snyder have simply put different labels on narrative principles we all intuitively comprehend from thousands of years of unconscious conditioning, why study them at all? Why not simply trust those precepts are already instinctive and immediately type FADE IN at the muse’s prompting?
Because just as a doctor requires an expert’s command of gross anatomy even if no two patients are exactly constitutionally alike, and an architect is expected to possess a mastery of structural engineering though every building is different, it behooves the storyteller—be them screenwriter, novelist, playwright, what have you—to consciously understand the fundamentals of the narrative arts:
The stages of the Hero’s Journey can be traced in all kinds of stories, not just those that feature “heroic” physical action and adventure. 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 way stations of the Hero’s Journey emerge naturally even when the writer in unaware of them, but some knowledge of this most ancient guide to storytelling is useful in identifying problems and telling better stories. Consider these twelve stages as a map of the Hero’s Journey, one of many ways to get from here to there, but one of the most flexible, durable, and dependable.
ibid., 7
I’ve read and reread previous versions of The Writer’s Journey endlessly, and I take new insight from it each time: An excellent primer for aspirants, it yields yet richer dividends for experienced writers—those that can readily appreciate it vis-à-vis their own work. Though this updated edition, which includes two brand-new essays in the appendices (“What’s the Big Deal?” and “It’s All About the Vibes, Man”), was certainly sufficient reason in its own right to revisit The Writer’s Journey, I had a more compelling motivation: I wanted to see for myself how Mr. Vogler makes a case for the type of conventional story arc he extols in the face of mounting evidence of its cultural irrelevance in our postnarrative era.
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