Neo meets with Morpheus, who reveals a terrifying truth: that the ordinary world as we know it is a computer simulation designed to enslave humanity to machines.Īt this juncture, the hero is ready to leave their ordinary world for the first time. The mentor’s role is to overcome the hero’s reluctance and prepare them for what lies ahead. They’re going to need help to avoid disaster or, worse, death. Nothing a little pep talk can’t fix! The mentor figure appears at this point to give the hero some much needed counsel, coaching, and perhaps a kick out the door.Īfter all, the hero is very inexperienced at this point. “I can’t do this… This is crazy!” Neo protests as he backs off the ledge. Morpheus urges Neo to escape by climbing out a skyscraper window. If you were asked to trade the comforts of home for a life-and-death journey fraught with peril, wouldn’t you give pause?Īgents arrive at Neo’s office to arrest him. This could be for any number of reasons: fear, disbelief, a sense of inadequacy, or plain unwillingness to make the sacrifices that are required.Ī little reluctance here is understandable. Oops! The hero chooses option A and attempts to refuse the call to adventure. He is urged to “follow the white rabbit.” At a nightclub, he meets Trinity, who tells him to seek Morpheus. They must make a choice: will they shrink from the call, or rise to the challenge?Ī mysterious message arrives in Neo’s computer, warning him that things are not as they seem. While readers may already understand the stakes, the hero is realizing them for the first time. The journey proper begins with a call to adventure-something that disrupts the hero’s ordinary life and confronts them with a problem or challenge they can’t ignore. While Neo runs a side operation selling illicit software, Thomas Anderson lives the most mundane life imaginable: he works at his cubicle, pays his taxes, and helps the landlady carry out her garbage. Anderson, aka Neo, programmer by day, hacker by night. Yes, there may be a big problem somewhere out there, but the hero at this stage has very limited awareness of it. It lets readers identify with the hero as just a regular person, “normal” like the rest of us. It’s important to lay the groundwork in this opening stage, before the journey begins. This is where we meet our hero, although the journey has not yet begun: first, we need to establish the status quo by showing the hero living their ordinary, mundane life. After all, what blog has not been improved by a little Keanu Reeves?
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To show you how the Hero’s Journey works in practice, we’ll also consider an example from the movie The Matrix (1999). Let’s take a look at each stage in more detail.
The 12 steps of the Hero's Journey are as follows:
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Still, it’s helpful to master the rules before deciding when and how to break them. Indeed, there are good reasons to deviate-not least of which is that this structure has become so ubiquitous.
It’s not a rigid formula that your plot must follow beat by beat. In The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (1992), screenwriter Christopher Vogler adapted Campbell’s three phases into the "12 Stages of the Hero’s Journey." This is the version we’ll analyze in the next section.įor writers, the purpose of the Hero’s Journey is to act as a template and guide. There are countless examples in books, music, and video games, from fantasy epics and Disney films to sports movies. Hollywood has embraced Campbell’s structure, most famously in George Lucas’s Star Wars movies. The hero returns in triumph to the familiar world. The hero ventures into the unknown ("the Special World") and overcomes various obstacles and challenges.ģ.
The hero leaves the ordinary world behind.Ģ. The three stages, or acts, of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey are as follows:ġ. Not all need be present in every myth or in the same order. Looking for common patterns in mythological narratives, Campbell described a character arc with 17 total stages, overlaid on a more traditional three-act structure. Joseph Campbell, a scholar of literature, popularized the monomyth in his influential work The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949). They learn lessons, overcome adversity, defeat evil, and return home transformed. A protagonist embarks on an adventure into the unknown. The Hero’s Journey is a common story structure for modeling both plot points and character development.
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