Stage 1 The known world
Ordinary World
INT. HOME - DAY
A plain-English guide
The Hero’s
Journey
The shape under most of the stories you know. What it is, where it comes from, the films and books that follow it to the letter, and the ones that tear it up.
- Two minutes
- Start
- Twenty minutes
- The shape and the stages
- The evening
- Everything from the maps down
Start here
The two-minute version
A character leaves the world they know, goes somewhere the rules are different, nearly dies, and comes back changed, carrying something the old world needed. That is the whole thing. Everything else on this page is detail.
Joseph Campbell noticed the pattern in myths from every continent and wrote it up in 1949 as The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He called it the monomyth. George Lucas read it while rewriting Star Wars and said so. Christopher Vogler, a story analyst at Disney, boiled it down to a seven-page memo in 1985 that went round every studio in Hollywood and later became a book. Dan Harmon, who made Community and Rick and Morty, squashed it into eight words on a circle. Those three versions are what people mean when they say “the hero’s journey.”
It is everywhere because it works. People respond to change, and the journey is a machine for showing a person change. Put the beats in the right order and an audience will feel a story even when the story is thin.
It is also why so many films feel the same. When every screenwriting class teaches the same beat sheet, every film hits the same beat at the same minute. The interesting work of the last thirty years has been in bending it: skipping the return, poisoning the reward, giving the journey to the wrong character, or running it so fast the audience sees the machinery.
Three questions get you most of the way.
- What does the character lack at the start?
- What has to die for them to get it?
- What do they bring back?
If you can answer those for a story, you understand its journey. If you cannot, the story may not have one, and that can be the point.
- Joseph Campbell
- 1949 Found the pattern in myth. Seventeen stages. The source.
- Christopher Vogler
- 1985, 1992 Turned it into a memo, then a book. Twelve stages. The version Hollywood uses.
- Blake Snyder
- 2005 Pinned fifteen beats to page numbers. The formula.
- Dan Harmon
- 2009 Drew it as a circle with eight words. The napkin version.
The shape
A circle, and a line across it
Dan Harmon’s version is the one to learn first, because you can draw it on a napkin. A circle. A line through the middle. The top half is the world the character knows: order, habit, comfort. The bottom half is the world they don’t: chaos, the unknown, the place where the thing they need is kept. The story goes round clockwise, once.
Beat 1 of 8
You
A character in a zone of comfort.
Top of the circle. Order, habit, the known world.
STAR WARS Luke on the farm, staring at the two suns.
Two things to notice. The line through the middle is crossed twice: going down at Go, coming back up at Return. Those two crossings are the ends of the first and second acts, and every other system on this page puts its biggest hinges in the same two places.
And the bottom of the circle, Find, is the furthest the character gets from home. It is also where they get what they wanted. Wanting turns out to be the easy part. The climb back up is what they pay for it, and what they are left holding at the top is rarely the thing they went down for.
The stages
Twelve steps, one at a time
Vogler’s version is the one Hollywood uses. It has more steps than Harmon’s, and the steps have names that writers, editors and producers all know, so it is the shared vocabulary. Each stage below has what it is, why it exists, and the trap writers fall into at it. Pick a film and that film’s beat for the stage appears at the bottom.
The maps
One story, five rulers
Campbell, Vogler, Harmon, Snyder and the three-act split are all measuring the same thing with different rulers. Laid on one timeline, they agree about where the important moments fall: the commitment at a quarter, the crisis at the half, the low point at two-thirds, the proof in the last fifth. Turn the rulers on and off. Tap a beat for its name.
Tap a beat.
Where they disagree is useful. Campbell’s middle section is full of stages no film uses, like Woman as Temptress and Atonement with the Father, because he was describing myths, not scripts. Snyder’s beats are pinned to pages because he was selling a method, and a method needs page numbers. Harmon’s are equal slices because he was writing for a format with ad breaks. The shape underneath does not care which ruler you use. Pick the one whose words you find easiest to remember and ignore the rest.
Followed to the letter
Nine stories that do it by the book
Each has a beat for every one of the twelve stages. Open one and read it down. Where the fit wobbles there is a note, because the wobble is usually where the craft is.
Torn up, on purpose
Fourteen stories that break it
The journey is so well known that leaving a beat out is now a way of saying something. These fourteen break it deliberately. Each one says which rule it breaks, how, and why the story works anyway. Filter by the rule.
Ways to think
Twelve questions to hold while you watch
Counting beats gets old fast. These are ways of seeing the structure without counting. Each one is a question you can ask of any film or novel, and most of them will tell you something about it in the first twenty minutes.
What to read
Twelve books, in the order to read them
One is marked as the place to start. Each has what it gives you and what to watch out for. Two of them are free and online. None of them agree with each other completely, which is the point of reading more than one.
Try it
Map a story you know
Pick a film or a book you know well and fill in the eight beats. The circle draws as you type. It saves in your browser and nowhere else, and you can copy it out as text when you are done.
Questions for tonight
Seven things to ask of whatever you watch next. Tick them as you go; the list remembers.