The Hero's Journey
I was a certified mythology nerd in middle school and high school, so when I came across a battered copy of Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth in my favorite used book store, I was mesmerized.
It’s the companion book to a 1988 6-part PBS documentary series by the same title, and is structured as a conversation between Joseph Campbell and journalist Bill Moyers. In it, Campbell dives deep into the universality of myths and how they help us understand our own individual journey. In other words, how the popular stories we tell—regardless of culture—are actually mirrors of our internal landscape.
I’d already noticed how many similarities there were in myths from around the world: origin stories, original sins, floods. But Campbell focused in on the stories of heroes spanning cultures and millennia, and pointed out that most follow a specific pattern of transformation:
Hero's Journey: Leave the known world —> get changed in the unknown —> return with something useful to share.
As a teenager, realizing that I was on a path that many had trod before me was oddly comforting.
I distinctly remember writing this quote in my notebook:
“Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.”
Epic stories of struggle and transformation are popular for a reason: we can all relate.
We’ve all been there.
No matter where we’re at in our journey, each of us is always somewhere in this cycle:
- Before (the familiar pain of the status quo)
- During (the messy middle of the struggle)
- After (the new normal, the promised land—before it becomes the status quo once more)
So, today we’re going back to the OG: Joseph Campbell and the monomyth theory he outlined in his 1949 book The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
In true Story Rebel fashion, though, we won’t stay theoretical—we’re getting practical.
We’ll be taking Campbell’s framework and talking about how to apply this stuff when you’re writing an About page, filming a reel, pitching a podcast host, or just trying to explain what you do to someone at a networking event.
—> Plus, at the very end of this post, you'll find a 30-SECOND SIGNATURE STORY TEMPLATE based on the Hero's Journey.
But before we dive in I want to point something out:
The Monomyth is Not the Only Myth
There’s a lot to critique about Campbell’s work.
It has a pretty big Western bias. Plus, he cherry-picked the blockbuster heroic stories out of the mix, leaving aside anything that didn’t particularly line up with the monomyth that he saw emerging from those more heroic epics.
Many powerful stories (especially community-based and ensemble stories) don’t fit neatly into his monomyth. Trying to force every mythic story into his framing flattens a world of weird, beautiful, and specific cultural storytelling traditions.
I first realized this in college, while writing a fantasy novel that never saw the light of day. The mythology of my made-up world did not follow the Hero’s Journey logic I thought I had to emulate—and neither did my heroine’s journey. I finally realized it mattered more to sync her journey with her culture’s mythology than to force Campbell’s shape onto her story.
Along with having tunnel vision, the Hero’s Journey is also very masculine-coded.
Of course, Campbell specifically said that the journey is gender-neutral, and back when he was writing, using “he,” his,” and “mankind” were still the accepted “genderless neutral pronouns” that meant everyone.
(That was still the case even when I was in college. For required hilarious reading on the topic of how we are all men, check out “Introducing Myself” by Ursula K. Le Guin.)
But protesting that “‘he’ pronouns include women” isn’t the same as deliberately including the stories of women and nonbinary heroes in the monomyth.
(Much like how women are more likely to sustain injuries in car crashes because all the crash test dummies are still designed around male bodies, even in this, the year of our lord 2025. [NPR].)
So:
- If you want to read a wonderful update to the Hero’s Journey that centers the stories of women, check out The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger.
- And if you want to read a beautiful essay on non-heroic stories—stories that are containers instead of weapons—I again point you to Le Guin and “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.”
The Hero's Journey may be flawed….
But the Hero's Journey Nails Transformations
All of this is say: if trying to conform your story to the Hero’s Journey makes you feel false, performative, or like you’re cosplaying a Marvel trailer, you’re not “doing it wrong.”
You’re noticing the limits of the tool.
But, if you’re in the business of guiding people through transformations, it’s an incredible framework for getting laser-focused on the steps of that journey.
The Hero’s Journey is a transformation blueprint. And, for our purposes, the goal of using it isn’t to make your origin story “epic”—it’s to make it clear.
Let’s get into the meat of it.
The Steps of the Hero’s Journey
The Hero’s Journey is often summarized as Departure →Initiation →Return....
—> Read the rest of the post on the Story Rebel blog.