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 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!
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.
The Hero’s Journey has served storytellers and their listeners since the very first stories were told, and it shows no signs of wearing out.
ibid., xxi
Eh… not quite. Since the dawn of the Digital Age, our steadfast sense of such linear narrativity has been disrupted by telecommunications technologies that consign us to a perpetual state of right now, by opportunistic advertisers that use story to sell us shit we don’t need, and by political propaganda that seeks to undermine our faith in fact-based reality itself. Beginnings and endings that bookend an objective reality are so last millennium. Such is why all our TV shows, from Game of Thrones to This Is Us, are these nonlinear narratives that follow umpteen different plotlines simultaneously while seldom ever satisfactorily resolving any of them.
That’s how stories are told now—to reflect the way we process reality in a world whereby narrative context has been usurped by helter-skelter content, of texts and tweets and DMs. No heroic journeys, no catharsis; instead, narrativity is replaced by something akin to a data-flow stream, refreshing in real time, in which an incoming update about what’s happening “over there” supersedes any obligation to the current action or unfolding event.
We sense this purposeful disregard for monomythic structural design, even if we can’t articulate it, when we watch postnarrative shows like Lost and The Wire and The Walking Dead; their avant-garde refusal to conform to predictable Aristotelian patterns is the very secret ingredient we find so exciting about them—that rather than inexorably winnowing as they go along, their narratives continue to branch outward indefinitely.
Consider the way the Godfather trilogy is a closed-ended morality tale—an antihero’s journey, if you like—about the rise and tragic fall of Michael Corleone, and compare that with The Sopranos, an open-ended “storyless” series that never even reached a conclusive resolution: The screen simply cut to black in the middle of an entirely inconsequential scene in a diner and the show was over. Far from a copout ending, it was an artful recognition on the part of creator David Chase that our culture has lost its collective sense of narrativity—of story.
Right now, there aren’t really any of them because we’ve woken up from 2,000 years of it. We were fools. We don’t want to be fooled again in that way, so when the narrative gets broken, whether it’s by 9/11, or the Internet, or the collapse of the economy, we look back and say, ‘Those great narratives of the 20th century, most of them were lies.’ Yeah, Martin Luther King Jr. was cool and I guess Gandhi was cool, but most of these things, like Nazism and communism and capitalism, and all of the ‘isms,’ were all really manipulative stories. Advertisers abused the stories so much that we don’t want to surrender our trust to anyone. We don’t trust the storytellers anymore, except in very few circumstances. Even our movies are all about time travel and moving backward because we don’t want to just go down that single path.
Molly Soat, “Digital Disruption and the Death of Storytelling,” Marketing News, April 2015, 44
Such is the inconvenient truth for those who’ve made their bones as screenwriting gurus since the spec-script boom of the late eighties and early nineties: The two-hour, closed-ended feature film—the Hero’s Journey itself—does not resonate with younger demographics reared on YouTube and TikTok videos. No one under thirty-five watches movies—like, ever—and many folks under twenty-five, born around the time The Writer’s Journey was first published, have never even seen one.
Don’t believe me? Poll your local member of Gens Y, Z, or Alpha. Kids don’t know what to make of a standalone feature; far from resonating with their nonlinear minds, the mythic patterns and archetypes of the Hero’s Journey bores the southern-fried fuck out of them. In a year or two from now, we’ll blame the coronavirus for killing theatrical exhibition, but be assured: The pandemic is merely putting a moribund mode of artistic expression out of its misery.
Given that, how, then, does Mr. Vogler reconcile the subject of his book—the virtues of the traditional story arc—with its undeniable obsolescence? Like the late Blake Snyder’s successors, the so-called “Master Cats” at Save the Cat!, Mr. Vogler mostly overlooks postnarrativity, and when he can’t, simply suggests it’s a new permutation of the age-old Hero’s Journey:
Because of changing technology and new ways of distributing entertainment, stories are growing longer and shorter at the same time. On one side of the scale, in the current wave of high-quality, long-form series produced by the likes of HBO, the BBC, Showtime, the History Channel, and Disney+, the audience has shown a taste for very long stories that may be driving toward an eventual conclusion, or that, like the Star Wars and Star Trek universes, may never end. On the other extreme of the narrative spectrum, people seem to enjoy stories that begin and end in a few minutes or less, and can be consumed on small smartphone or smartwatch screens.
Although the Hero’s Journey model presented in this volume was conceived primarily to describe the course of a feature film of ninety minutes to two hours, it has always been flexible enough to adapt to super-long or super-short storytelling.
Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, x–xi
Except, the Hero’s Journey hasn’t been adapted—it’s been obliterated, “if for no other reason than [doing so] questions traditional narratives and heroic, individualistic values” (Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 131). It isn’t merely technology and distribution platforms that have changed; our very cultural worldview has shifted. Storyless fiction isn’t a reworking of the Hero’s Journey, but rather a repudiation of it—of its linear conception of reality and its assurance of conclusive resolutions, of cathartic endings.
Vogler cites the controversial Sopranos finale as an example of the dissatisfaction a narrative can engender when in place of catharsis it offers merely uncertainty or ambiguity, but The Sopranos never promised any Return with the Elixir, opting instead to be only “about survival in the midst of internecine battles. The characters long to be characters in The Godfather movies, who lived by a strict code of ethics and whose careers had more predictable, traditional arcs” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now [New York: Penguin Group, 2013], 33).
Monomythic narrativity (The Godfather) and postnarrativity (The Sopranos) have altogether different—and incompatible—forms and functions, and there are increasingly fewer examples of the former to be found in the twenty-first century.
The new edition of The Writer’s Journey inadvertently illustrates that last point via the cinematic antecedents Mr. Vogler relies on throughout the book: The Searchers (1956). Romancing the Stone (1984). An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). Arabesque (1966). Beverly Hills Cop (1984). Dances with Wolves (1990). Gunga Din (1939). Body Heat (1981). Vertigo (1958). Christ, you’d have to be nearly fifty years old to begin to appreciate any of those references!
The only recent movie that gets a deep-dive analysis is 2017 Best Picture winner The Shape of Water, which, though conceptually brilliant (it re-envisions Creature from the Black Lagoon as a monster-and-maiden romance à la Coppola’s Dracula), suffers from some problematically sloppy screenwriting. All of which only bolsters the case against the relevance of the Hero’s Journey narrative model. That’s disheartening, because we need prescriptive storytelling—from honest, skilled storytellers—now more than ever.
There’s still room for traditional stories. It’s just that we have to almost consciously reintegrate those stories and understand that they’re just one way of seeing the world. . . .
. . . But I do think that as we get a little bit more comfortable, or maybe as we get uncomfortable in a purely digital world, we will start to ache again for these more prescriptive narratives and, hopefully, turn to trustworthy storytellers to do it.
Soat, “Digital Disruption and the Death of Storytelling,” 44
Consciously reintegrating those kinds of stories, though, is easier said than done. Aspiring writers aren’t studying the works of Campbell or Vogler—they are often, in fact, being encouraged to depreciate or dismiss those teachings—and they’re not even absorbing monomythic storytelling osmotically, simply because there’s so much less of it being produced nowadays.
And even postnarrativity, that antithetical and perfectly noble Digital Age response to the Campbellian story arc, has itself been hijacked and abused by media corporations that have substituted the closed-ended reward of catharsis with the open-ended obligation of scorekeeping: The sprawling continuities of Star Wars and Star Trek, Game of Thrones and Westworld, and Marvel and DC Comics keep us puzzling over “spoilers” and “Easter eggs” in a rabbit-hole search for cohesive meaning that always seems to be just out of arm’s reach. That these multimedia initiatives aren’t building toward conclusion isn’t a philosophical statement so much as a capitalistic imperative: None of this means anything unless you’ve experienced everything—every episode, spin-off, videogame, and tie-in novel the franchise has to offer. Only then will you “get it.” Cha-ching!
To be clear: When an exercise in self-perpetuating storytelling as shapeless, pointless, and spoiler-driven as Game of Thrones, which ranks only behind SNL with regard to all-time Emmy wins and nominations (and was once described by its creators as a 73-hour movie, as though that were a thing), is the reigning standard-bearer of narrative excellence for a generational cohort that came of age on it, traditional storytelling is in deep shit.
Democracy, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is in deep shit, too, and we’re going to need both—democracy and narrativity—in the decade to come to steer our way out of the hole we’re in. We’ll depend on disciplined storytellers to use the tools of narrativity to make a creative and inspiring case for the virtues of Enlightenment democracy. When asked to comment on Trump’s ongoing attempts to undermine the United States Postal Service, author David Brin recently said this about his 1985 post-apocalyptic novel The Postman, in which an itinerant loner (and onetime drama student) garbed in a salvaged mail carrier’s uniform inadvertently becomes a symbol of hope for a restored central government:
The heart-message was, a Mad Max solitary hero was not going to make much difference, but a storyteller who manages to remind survivors that they were once mighty beings called citizens might really matter. That’s what we’re trying to do right now, remind folks amid a deliberately-incited culture war, that we have a common project, and the things that knit us together, that allow us to continue the conversation, even the arguments, based on fact, these are things that are of value.
Clark Collis, “The Postman author warns Donald Trump’s attack on the mail service could take us back to the Middle Ages,” Entertainment Weekly, August 17, 2020
We need talented, passionate storytellers willing to rise to this challenge—to take on a page-one rewrite of the social contract. What we don’t need are any more authors and filmmakers serving as willful corporate shills (no more Star Wars), or indulging Reagan-era nostalgia (see previous parenthetical), or creating yet more meaningless, anything-goes fiction that’s more concerned with servicing superfans than saying something insightful about the human condition.
Complicating matters, as media theorist Douglas Rushkoff observes in Present Shock, is a fundamental incompatibility of traditional stories with the “presentist” folkways of the Digital Age. For twenty years, our postnarrative fiction has denied us the boon of catharsis, because a culture in a sustained state of presentism doesn’t pass through the stages of the Hero’s Journey:
Concerned mythologists and anthropologists foresaw this moment of discontinuity and called upon storytellers to create a new story for this new society—or else. Joseph Campbell believed the first images of the Earth from space utterly shattered our individual cultural narratives and required humanity to develop a universal story about Gaia, the Earth Mother. That clearly hasn’t happened. Robert Bly sees manhood as the principal victim of the end of storytelling, as men no longer have a way to learn about the role of the father or the qualities of good leadership. By retelling lost myths, Bly hopes, men can reestablish their connection to these traditions.
Rushkoff, Present Shock, 39
Mr. Vogler, too, recognizes, in his own way, the challenges posed by the collapse of narrativity:
Where are movies going in their search for situations that will trigger some kind of emotional or physical reaction? Is it harder to stimulate people today, and what will moviemakers and storytellers of the future use to bring about catharsis?
Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, 426
The answer to the first question, as should be apparent by now, is nowhere. Presentist fiction is “less about what will happen next, or how the story will end, than about figuring out what is actually going on right now—and enjoying the world of the fiction, itself” (Rushkoff, Present Shock, 32).
The response to the second query—What will moviemakers and storytellers of the future use to bring about catharsis?—lies in how well we teach cathartic storytelling to digital natives for whom that is a “lost art.” We need to instruct them on a mode of fiction that’s less driven by a corporate mandate of self-perpetuation than it is by an ethical responsibility to perpetuate progressive ideals, democratic values, scientific fact, and the kind of causality we’ve lost touch with in our “multiverse” reality.
After functioning as a sturdy template for the Hollywood blockbuster at the end of the last century, perhaps the Hero’s Journey can find purpose anew as a roadmap for a culture that’s lost its sense of contextual linearity? After all, its “archetypal patterns turn a chaotic event like the sinking of an ocean liner into a coherent design that asks questions and provides opinions about how life should be lived” (Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, 272). It once inspired the commercial imagination of a generation of blockbuster filmmakers; perhaps now it can aid twenty-first-century storytellers in expanding our moral imagination.
That means not merely eschewing the questionable values embedded in so much of our popular fiction, but consciously and purposefully subverting them, much the way David Brin took the celebrated clichés of doomsday dystopias—“little-boy wish fantasies about running amok in a world without rules,” as he describes the genre—and transmuted them into a sci-fi parable of where we came from and where we could go, if only someone were wise enough to recognize that, creative enough to envision it, and skilled enough to inspire it. The storyteller hero of The Postman reminded the survivors of his post-apocalyptic world of the immense powers and responsibilities of citizenry, and right now storytellers in our postnarrative world—with its “alternative facts” and reality-show president—need to be reminded of the immense powers and responsibilities of storytelling itself.
Else who will reform the exploitive genre of “disaster porn” to help us meet the existential challenges posed by climate disruption? Certainly not our beloved superhero fiction, which reflexively and unimaginatively treats ecological collapse as nothing more than a new villainous motivation for the same old villainous schemes—a one-off problem to be solved by messianic demigods, no less, not a global, generations-spanning effort of holistic ecological restoration.
Who will envision a new type of crime fiction in which the policed are portrayed at least as empathetically as the police? Which storytellers will have the moral imagination to show us the kind of just world we could have by dramatizing a new kind of law-enforcement narrative—one that rejects the pornographic glorification of violence and gleeful disregard for constitutional rights of our action movies and police procedurals, and realistically confronts, uncomfortable though it may be, the institutionalized racism of the American justice system?
Who’s going to show the world that deregulated techno-capitalism, “which is how we extract time and resources from people and places and convert it to capital,” isn’t a God-given absolute, merely a manmade operating system—one that can be reprogrammed, or, more ideally, replaced with an egalitarian socioeconomic order, like democratic eco-socialism?
Same as it was in the years following the American Revolution, and then once again the era of the New Deal, imagining the story of what’s possible for our country, our culture, and our very civilization starts with our wordsmiths. Even the most venerable paradigms started humbly—as ideas expressed, visions conveyed, stories told.
At its best—when it isn’t being abused to promote “an aspirational culture in which product purchases, job advancement, trophy spouses, and the accumulation of capital are the only prizes that matter” (Rushkoff, Team Human, 142)—narrativity inspires us to dream of a world measurably better than the one we have, and offers a blueprint to build it:
Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world. A story can make us angry enough to change the world. We know that medical placebos work when a trusted authority figure, in the form of a doctor, simply tells us they will. There is even a “nocebo” concept to explain why some people get sick or die when they are cursed by a witch doctor or wrongly diagnosed by a medical doctor. We know that hypnosis works. There is observable evidence to suggest that what we believe to be true directly affects how we live. As the first few years of the twenty-first century wore on, I wondered just how badly people, especially young people, were being affected by the overwhelmingly alarmist, frightening, and nihilistic mass media narratives that seemed to boil with images of death, horror, war, humiliation, and pain to the exclusion of almost everything else, on the presumed grounds that these are the kinds of stories that excite the jaded sensibilities of the mindless drones who consume mass entertainment. Cozy at our screens in the all-consuming glare of Odin’s eye, I wondered why we’ve chosen to develop in our children a taste for mediated prepackaged rape, degradation, violence, and “bad-ass” mass-murdering heroes.
Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011), 409
Indeed.
But in order to consciously reintegrate prescriptive stories, we need to face certain realities: Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey stopped working at some point. With all due respect to Mr. Vogler: It’s not thriving; it’s broken. It broke after decades of abuse by Hollywood, by politicians, by advertisers, by media messiahs. It stopped serving its intended function, and now it’s in danger of becoming a dead language, like Latin—fodder for scholars to wax esoteric, devoid of any apparent practical application. It needs to be retaught; we can no longer assume storytellers know it intuitively or appreciate its innate value. By all means: Experiment with it. Rearrange it. Challenge its conventions. Bend it to your creative will—it can take it.
But learn it. And use it—creatively and responsibly.
To that end, The Writer’s Journey is an invaluable resource; I wish everyone would read it, and I wish the twenty-fifth anniversary edition had made a more persuasive case for its own relevance. Regardless of one’s preferred narrative mode—monomythic storytelling or postnarrativity—the contemporary writer is obliged to recognize the form, function, and indeed existence of both, “not contaminating the principles of the one with those of the other, yet permitting the mind to know the one by virtue of the other” (Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 3rd ed. [Novato, California: New World Library, 2008], 196).
Campbell, in his immortal wisdom, even had an honorific for such a conversant individual: Master of the Two Worlds.
“The Road Back” is dedicated to the memory of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose own hero’s journey will forever serve as an inspirational model of compassion, courage, wisdom, and true patriotism—for putting her country’s wellbeing ahead of her own.
I am a fan of the Hero’s Journey and it underlies most of my prehistoric fiction. It’s a powerful method of telling a story that works. I guess if others want to try something new, do so at their own peril!
Hey, Jacqui!
I am all for creative experimentation. With Psycho (1960), Hitchcock toyed with our culturally conditioned need to identify with the “hero” of the Hero’s Journey by killing the protagonist halfway through the movie, forcing us to identify with… Norman Bates! Long before Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) and Inception (2010), Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction was one of the first mainstream blockbusters to challenge our institutionalized notions of linear narrativity — to profound creative success. And Deep Space Nine (1993), while building on the Star Trek mythos established in The Original Series and particularly The Next Generation, nonetheless took some substantial creative risks by deviating from the standalone-episode format of its franchise forebears and incorporating longer-term story arcs (and even darker themes) before such things were fashionable. Though it’s hard to recall this now, all three of those examples — Psycho, Pulp, and DS9 — initially provoked discomfort in their audiences, and I think that’s a good thing. There are, of course, risks involved in narrative experimentation — it begets more misfires than bull’s-eyes — but the rewards tend to outweigh them.
But experimentation without discipline is just disorder. An artist will stand a better chance of telling a more creatively successful story — especially one than bucks convention — if they’re well-versed in the principles of the craft. And with so much fiction these days refusing to conform to any recognizable story patterns, particularly the prestige TV series of cable and streaming services, there is now a greater imperative to teach traditional mythic structure to aspiring writers; we can’t really operate on the presumption that people “get it” anymore. Writers needn’t — shouldn’t — be taught it’s the only way to write, but they should be aware of both its advantages and limitations as a mode of narrative expression.
Congrats again on the recent publication of your prehistoric epic Against All Odds, Jacqui, and thanks so much for the visit!
Sean
Sean,
This is one of your best pieces yet. How crazy is it to think that an entire generation of writers (or more) are not only oblivious to the Hero’s Journey, but that they’re being groomed to reject it. It was a cornerstone of my (and I assume your) education, as vital as Syd Field’s “Screenplay.” As viewers, you and I have expectations that simply aren’t the norm anymore. Excellent job tying the collapse of the Hero’s Journey into the modern state of the world, as well. Art and reality have always been connected, and both are in deep shit right now.
Thanks, Jeff, for the kind and thoughtful comment!
You and I are both authors that come from a screenwriting background, so we’ve had structure drilled into our heads! One simply can’t survive in Hollywood without knowing how to reduce a story to a logline, how to present it via an at-a-glance “beat sheet” or corkboard, and how to deliver a screenplay that hits all the beats as conventionally prescribed and expected. Many aspiring novelists, most of whom studied only literary theory in college (at best), don’t get a chance to develop the skills we acquired on our “couch tours” (as we called them) of the prodco offices around Tinseltown! Author E. J. Wenstrom’s candid account of drafting her Third Realm War trilogy is testament to how easily writers get lost in the weeds of their own creative ambitions.
And as I said to Jacqui above, with more and more fiction these days refusing to conform to conventional narrative patterns, particularly the prestige TV series of cable and streaming services (which are, for the most part, more about expansive worldbuilding than purposeful storytelling), we’re incrementally losing whatever inherent sense we may’ve had for the underlying organizational principles of story. In a world increasingly devoid of narrative context, the contextual history of narrative itself is eroding. And for reasons I argued in “What Comes Next,” narrative is the solution, not the problem. The problem is irresponsible and/or immoral storytellers who’ve abused narrative to the point where we just don’t trust stories anymore. So, “The Road Back” is my plea for storytellers to develop both their command of craft and their moral imagination to help us envision new, honorable narratives that might illumine a path forward for our culture — that will help jar us out of the presentist state to which we’ve been interminably consigned in the Digital Age.
For those who haven’t yet had a chance to read it, check out Jeff’s latest blog post, “Monster Mash: The Grand Bazaar of Ethra VanDalia.”
SPC
Have you read Chris Winkle’s take-down, “It’s Time to Throw Out The Hero With a Thousand Faces”?
https://mythcreants.com/blog/its-time-to-throw-out-the-hero-with-a-thousand-faces/
No, I hadn’t seen that one, Dell. I saw the post he published last month, “Why Structures Like The Hero’s Journey Don’t Work,” and I linked to it in this essay, but I overlooked “It’s Time to Throw Out The Hero With a Thousand Faces.” Thanks, as always, for bringing a relevant article to my attention.
Chris seems like my kinda guy: He’s opinionated, unafraid to challenge conventional wisdom, and well-versed in his subject matter; he writes forcibly, with a lot of documentation to support his thesis.
I might only suggest he’s arguing in favor of something that’s already (long since) occurred. The Hero with a Thousand Faces was more or less supplanted by The Writer’s Journey, which is a far more accessible treatise on mythic structure for all the reasons Chris addresses in his screed against Campbell. No one’s reading Campbell anymore (exhibit A: the comments section of Chris’ post), and the monomythic principles taught by Vogler and Snyder are losing purchase exponentially. (The Save the Cat! blog has become one of the saddest and loneliest places on the Internet, full of terrible and nonsensical advice like “How to Write an Upside-Down Logline.”)
Is The Hero with a Thousand Faces “the most insightful work on storytelling ever written” as Chris contends some have claimed? I don’t know. Its notions have been around for a long time, so there must be something to them. After all, just as Vogler’s study of traditional narrativity stands on Campbell’s shoulders, so did Campbell’s stand on Aristotle’s:
Such is why I suggest storytellers refamiliarize themselves with the Hero’s Journey. It’s not about promoting a one-size-fits-all screenwriting formula — not at all! Vogler himself specified (in an earlier edition of Writer’s Journey, though not, as I recall, the current one) that the Hero’s Journey is a form, not a formula. It’s a guide to storytelling, not a how-to rulebook. And it’s worth knowing if we’re going to wrest narrativity back from those governments, corporations, religions, and educators trying to influence our behavior. I want to put that power to work for the betterment of society, not the detriment of it.
Chris is arguing for the Hero’s Journey to go away; I’m saying it’s all but gone, and receding further every year, and I’m simply asking us to consider the cultural resource we are on the cusp of losing, and whether or not it’s worth salvaging — and repurposing. It’s served civilization well — it got us this far — and I’m betting it’s going to come in useful as we reimagine every aspect of society in the decade to come. Provided, of course, we get that orange asshole out of power in five weeks! So, as they used to say at the end of the first installment of those two-part TV episodes when we were kids: To be continued…
Thanks for popping by, Dell; your contributions are always greatly appreciated.
SPC
Chris Winkle is female, and uses she/her pronouns
Appreciate the correction, Dell. My apologies. I made an assumption off her first name without looking further into the matter, betraying my own gender biases.
Several years ago she also wrote Using the Heroine’s Journey
> The monomyth known as the Hero’s Journey has become widely popular. Unfortunately, the original was clearly intended for men and not women. In response, some feminists have created their own, female-centered version, called the Heroine’s Journey. Lucky for us storytellers, both can be abstracted into a structure that works for a wide array of stories.
>I’ll take you through a tour of The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock. She created this journey to help real women through life’s hardships, but it has a lot to offer as a story structure. In honor of its feminist roots, I will refer to the central character as the heroine, with she/her. However, it applies to male characters just as well.
https://mythcreants.com/blog/using-the-heroines-journey/
Thanks for sharing “Using the Heroine’s Journey,” Dell, because I’d never previously come across that post on Mythcreants. It would seem six years before Chris published “Why Structures Like The Hero’s Journey Don’t Work” and “It’s Time to Throw Out The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” she had a perspective on the monomythic story arc more closely in sync with my own: It’s a versatile storytelling tool, and not — as some misguided adherents and virtually all skeptics would contend — a set of dogmatic narrative precepts. It’s a toolbox, not a rulebook — and I say that as someone who’s worked with many agents, managers, and producers who misinterpreted and misused it as the latter.
(To be certain: I’m in no way criticizing Chris for her apparent reversal, as my own blog is demonstrably full of contradictory and revisionist views and opinions across the nearly hundred posts I’ve published. I resist the temptation to edit or delete older posts that no longer reflect my positions and/or beliefs because, after all, one’s own intellectual evolution is the very point of blogging! It’s a public journal, in that sense. E.M. Forster once said: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” That’s what blogging does for me: It offers me an outlet to see what I say so I can know what I think. And what I think now may be a metamorphosis, or merely an adjustment, or even a repudiation of what I thought five years ago. I imagine a blogger as prolific and thoughtful as Chris would second such an assessment.)
Regardless of how she may feel now, “Using the Heroine’s Journey” makes a compelling case for the way in which traditional narrativity (alternately — and somewhat capriciously — referred to on this blog as Aristotelian, cathartic, monomythic, or prescriptive narrativity, a.k.a Joseph Campbell’s “heroic journey”) differs from presentist fiction (sometimes called “storyless” or postnarrative fiction here): In traditional narratives, there’s a value at stake, and that value is the subject of the story’s theme (the value at stake in — and thematic preoccupation of — The Matrix, for instance, is freedom); the theme then directly correlates with the protagonist’s character arc.
(Quick sidebar: Character arcs are unambiguously the least understood component of storytelling, even by experienced and accomplished writers. Only one narratologist, as far as I know, has ever cracked that code: David Freeman. I wish I could share some of his amazing insights, but all of his teachings are proprietary. Still, this article on his website covers some of those advanced techniques, so I recommend it for anyone interested in the subject.)
But because postnarrative fiction offers no climax or catharsis, opting instead to hold us in a sustained state of presentism (it’s all rising tension without release), it has no thematic boon or wisdom to confer (other than perhaps arguing, as The Sopranos and The Wire did, that the world can’t much be altered by any heroic action or plot point), and transformational arcs are absolutely antithetical to a narrative form that eschews conclusive resolution above all; a hero can’t change in the end when there is no end, merely a perpetual right now. Such is why we call it “storyless” fiction (a term I cribbed from Rushkoff), because a story gives us a prescriptive model for change, whereas postnarrative fiction mostly exists to disavow or deconstruct the narrative worldview — sometimes artfully (Pulp Fiction and Family Guy) and sometimes disingenuously (as I would assert was the case for Game of Thrones as well as most of our transmedia mega-franchises, which adopt the techniques of postnarrativity, but only to serve their own commercial self-perpetuation, a subject I recently covered at length in “In the Multiverse of Madness”).
Aristotle cracked the rudimental code of narrativity, right? He’s the guy that identified the basic dramatic arc as one of rising action, climax, and catharsis. Fast forward 2,000 years, and here comes Joseph Campbell to further codify the form after studying the Western literary canon and noting time and again — Would you look at that! — the Aristotelian arc seemed to serve as the structural blueprint for story after story after story. But Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” was far from the final word on the matter — the sacrosanct way of codifying story structure. Done and done!
No — not at all. I don’t know whether or not Vogler was familiar with Maureen Murdock’s work when he wrote The Writer’s Journey, but he devotes a considerable chunk of page real estate to masculine and feminine “energies,” so he, too, saw room to augment, improve, correct, or elaborate on some of Campbell’s assumptions. (The protagonist of my WIP is a heterosexual white male, age 30, whose spirit is animated by a much stronger current of so-called “feminine energy” than the other hetero male characters — like his father and elder brother — putting him in conflict with them and thereby allowing for a richer dramatic exploration of the story’s themes.)
And then came Blake Snyder, who threw out all the academic gobbledygook, and customized the Aristotelian story schema to aid Hollywood screenwriters. But he didn’t merely rename esoteric terms like “Approach to the Inmost Cave” with far more intuitive and user-friendly labels like “Midpoint”; using the Hero’s Journey, he was able to identify ten types of stories — genres, if you like — that adhere to those mythic patterns. That was a huge innovation! People have been trying for centuries to figure out how many different types of stories there are, and — for my money — nobody’s come closer to cracking that code than Snyder. When I’m breaking the back of a story, I don’t reference The Hero with a Thousand Faces or The Writer’s Journey; I use Save the Cat! I use the genre classifications so I can study the proper narrative antecedents; I use the Beat Sheet to figure out the macro structure; and I use the Board to plot it out beat for beat. And very often in the writing process, I discover that something that made sense on the Board doesn’t work for reasons X, Y, or Z, but it’s precisely because I’ve outlined my story so meticulously that I can pivot on the fly and yet keep moving forward. I use the Beat Sheet (which is just the Hero’s Journey by another name) as a road map, and when I encounter an unforeseen roadblock, I detour as necessary but can always find my way back to the interstate.
Folks often use the terms story and plot interchangeably, but plot is merely one facet of story. The story is the plot, the arcs, and the themes all working in unison to create a unified, meaningful whole; the story is what all of those disparate elements add up to in the final tally. It’s a lot of balls for a writer to juggle — that’s what makes storytelling so hard, and why we admire storytellers who somehow make it look so effortless! — and the Hero’s Journey (in all of its many permutations, by all of its many names) is a tool to help the storyteller achieve narrative cohesion and, if the fates permit, emotional resonance.
And yes: The Aristotelian story arc has been abused by Hollywood, and by Madison Avenue, and by Washington, D.C. — it’s become predictable and manipulative and, to a generation reared on TikTok and MMORPGs, boring. I get it. Such is why we threw it out the window at the turn of the millennium and opted for the anything-goes fiction of our nonlinear TV series and interactive videogames. But I also think, twenty years into the new century, the all-but-ubiquitous postnarrative media landscape presents us with an opportunity — and a responsibility — to reintegrate and reinvent cathartic narrativity for a culture desperate for aspirational goals and for meaning and moral instruction once again. Storytellers have a rare chance now to make everything old new again!
So, as people who appreciate and respect the discipline of storytelling, let’s have another look at the erstwhile Hero’s Journey, and — taking a cue from Murdock and Vogler and Snyder — let’s debate which aspects of Campbell still have value here in 2021, and which need to be retired or adjusted in accordance with the times. (Much the same as AOC’s Green New Deal looks to FDR’s New Deal as its inspiration, but to address different needs for a different era.) The Hero’s Journey is a valuable cultural resource, but its value is entirely dependent on how well, how wisely, how artfully, and how responsibly we use it. It doesn’t belong to Campbell anymore; it belongs to us. Let’s take good care of it and make it our own.
Interesting post, Sean. I like the Hero’s Journey too, Sean, and my books as well as books that I enjoy tend to follow that structure, more or less. It’s still the expectation in literature (as far as I can tell) and readers tend to complain about inconclusive and unsatisfactory endings.
That said, film is different for me. I like the Hero’s Journey, but I also like post narrative stories. I liked Walking Dead, Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Lost, series that go on and on for years. Somehow the wandering plotline doesn’t bother me as long as the characters don’t constantly make stupid decisions to further the plot (Fear of Walking Dead – those people are beyond annoying). Even Lost, which made no sense at all, was entertaining.
Now, I’ll contradict myself and complain that post-narrative series endings are frequently disappointing. Two things seem to happen: 1) They go on too long and fizzle out (Walking Dead is an example of this. I stopped caring a couple of years ago. Is this series still a thing? I don’t even know.) Or, 2) The end is unsatisfying because things don’t get (can’t get) wrapped up. Being left with questions is okay, but it does feel like these stories work themselves into corners and have no options but to drop off a cliff. Sopranos and Lost are great examples of this.
Books won’t get away with that very often if at all.
With an amazingly thoughtful comment like that, Diana, you are asking for trouble! I could talk TV and books with you all day! Let me see if I can hit a few points as briefly (relatively speaking) as possible…
A lot of these open-ended television series tend to wear me out after a few seasons, albeit often for different reasons. With The Sopranos, about midway through the run of the series I felt this overwhelming need to get out of that world. I didn’t dislike the show; I just wanted out. The way most mob stories work (notably GoodFellas, but also other classics like The Godfather and State of Grace) is that the first half is seductive: You get brought into the world of a crime family — and for a while, it’s a lot of fun! But it’s only once you’re deep into it (“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”) that it stops being fun, and becomes downright stressful (think of Henry Hill’s coke-fueled paranoia in GoodFellas).
Such is the entire point of those sagas: that a life in organized crime is a road to nowhere, and once you’re in, you don’t get out. The audience, however, is let out — when the end credits roll. The Sopranos, however, because of the open-ended nature of its narrative, refused to let the audience out — we remained suspended in a state of presentism along with the characters — so at some point I just had to absent myself from that world. (I did tune in again for the final season, once I was assured an end was in sight, I just couldn’t do it on a week-to-week basis any longer after the first few years.)
The Walking Dead finally wore me out with its relentless, soul-crushing nihilism. That was another world that was fun for a while, but then became seriously not fun (albeit, unlike Sopranos, to no apparent point). So I bailed. Fear the Walking Dead, like so many spinoffs to hit shows, suffered from having no central premise. When you sell a TV series, it has to have a premise. Grey’s Anatomy was sold as a primetime medical soap about a student physician completing her surgical residency at the hospital where her Alzheimer’s-stricken mother once served as its brilliant general surgeon. Sure, the show would have love triangles and life-and-death emergencies and all that juicy stuff, but underpinning all that was a protagonist going on a very turbulent emotional journey, trying to establish a career in the long shadow of an ailing parent with whom she’s had a troubled history. It’s by no means a high-concept premise, but it’s enough to give the show a dramatic identity from which emotionally resonant stories can be developed.
Eager to replicate Grey’s success, they later developed a companion series for Kate Walsh’s character, the premise of which was exactly this: It’s a spinoff from Grey’s Anatomy. That’s it. Private Practice had no premise, except perhaps Kate Walsh goes to work for a small clinic with considerably less life-and-death urgency than she confronted at Seattle Grace. The show wasn’t about anything; it had no dramatic raison d’être. The plots were shapeless (and pointless) and the characters had no consistent personalities (the poor actors played every scene at an eleven to compensate for the paper-thin characterizations) because no one ever bothered to figure out what the series was about, other than being an offshoot of this other thing you really like! Same for Fear the Walking Dead. I mean, ostensibly Fear was pitched as the “early days” of the outbreak — the period the mothership series skipped over while Rick was in his coma — but it wasn’t long before its creators abandoned any pretense of that in favor of the same old zombie drama. Yawn.
Most “postnarrative” shows, though, lose me when they promise Grand Finales they can’t possibly hope to deliver on. Series like this include Lost, Game of Thrones, Westworld, and Orphan Black. All of those explicitly (and repeatedly) promised conclusive and cathartic resolutions despite that being antithetical to the avant-garde form their creators were working within! Those series were never “about creating satisfying resolutions, but rather about keeping the adventure alive and as many threads going as possible” (Rushkoff, Present Shock, 34). If only their writers had understood that.
All of this is, as you rightly observe, less common in literary fiction. I think there are several reasons for that. First: Books don’t often anchor multimedia franchises. (Harry Potter is a rare exception.) Novels are often ancillary products in a larger franchise, as is the case with Star Wars and Star Trek. The mandate of a multimedia initiative is to get you to purchase every product in the franchise — all the Blu-rays, videogames, comic books, action figures, and branded apparel. Let’s face it: Books seldom generate that kind of excitement, that level of brand loyalty. Even Harry Potter and A Song of Ice and Fire, respectably successful literary properties though they were, reached much wider global audiences once they were adapted for film, and all of the imagery associated with those franchises comes directly from the movies/TV series.
Now, just like movies and television, books have bestselling franchises, too, but they tend to still follow the old model, in which each new story is its own self-contained adventure. Jack Reacher, Robert Langdon, Alex Cross, etc., have each been featured in who-knows-how-many books at this point, but they’re mostly standalone stories, much the way movie series like James Bond and Indiana Jones used to function: One book is successful, so it begets another story that hews closely to the established formula. Few bestselling literary series are truly open-ended; A Song of Ice and Fire is an outlier in that respect (and, accordingly, it is testing the patience of even its most ardent fans).
Even long-running literary series like Outlander and The Vampire Chronicles, which don’t necessarily adhere to an easy-bake formula à la Dan Brown and James Patterson, still offer a complete story in each book that invites you to read the next installment, but doesn’t demand it. With these TV shows (and movie series like the MCU), we are obligated to watch every episode, in sequential order, for years on end — and we’re advised to watch them in real time else a “spoiler” on social media taint the experience.
Books just don’t operate like that, in part because the (ever-dwindling) audience for them approaches stories with more patience. Reading isn’t a “bingeable” experience, but rather the antithesis of that — it asks us to slow down. TV viewers, on the other hand, have been trained to be on constant alert for “Easter eggs”; the value we take from a televisional experience has nothing to do with the message it imparts, but rather is in direct proportion to how many obscure in-universe cross-references we catch. Every detail in a mega-franchise, no matter how fleeting or minor, is designed to withstand crosschecking for continuity consistency; every offhanded textural reference (“You fought in the Clone Wars?”) eventually becomes the basis for its own box-ticking entry in the series, forming a correlating — and ever-expanding — web of Easter eggs that ostensibly serve to enrich the grander narrative… but are in fact surreptitious tests of viewer loyalty. To meet that test, the content must be binged, else a fleeting allusion in episode 3 might be forgotten about by the time we get to episode 7, and now the Delphic plot intricacies can no longer be followed. (This is how Game of Thrones operated, hence the reason I hated that cynical show from “Winter Is Coming” onward.)
Novelists, by and large, aren’t in the same state of “present shock” as screenwriters (see my reply to dellstories above), because they are writing for a readership that practices — even relishes — patience, versus a multimedia audience that has been conditioned to consume entertainment with the speed and frequency of fast food.
Alas, the very fact that novels don’t have much of an audience anymore is yet more proof of the collapse of narrativity, which makes it all the more urgent that storytellers work to preserve the Hero’s Journey, and to expose audiences to it through increasingly more innovative — and trustworthy — ways. That’s not going to be done through novels, which no one reads, nor movies, which no one watches. And I somehow doubt television will be the savior of traditional storytelling. But I do think an effort needs to be made to teach cathartic narrativity, and to inspire the storytellers of the future to innovate new modes of creative expression that invoke and honor it.
But that’s just my “short” answer!
Sean
Phew. Thanks for the short answer. Lol. Westworld is another one where I watched two seasons and gave up. I picture a group of screenwriters sitting around a table, making things up as they go, tossing out “wouldn’t it be cool” ideas and using them all regardless of whether they make sense.
I hope that the film industry swings back in the other direction some day. Isn’t that how humans do things?
I hope people continue to read, but you’re right that no one is going to make millions of bucks on book franchises. It even sounds absurd.
Westworld to me exemplifies everything wrong with “prestige” cable television: “With unlimited resources and imagination, they’ve opted to continue making cold and largely impenetrable puzzle-box nonsense” (Alan Sepinwall, “‘Westworld’: What the Hell Happened to This Show in Season 2?”, Rolling Stone, June 25, 2018).
The best production design and acting talent in the world can’t mask the fact that the screenwriting is pure faux-philosophical nonsense. The writers indulge in pretentious, Delphic puzzle-boxing that can’t possibly (and won’t) add up, yet they challenge us to make sense of its labyrinthine mythos by meticulously reverse-engineering a coherent, indisputable timeline out of its nonlinear sequence of events. And they’ve implicitly promised it will all make sense — that once we figure out the meaning of that stupid maze, the secrets of Arnold Weber’s “narrative” will be unlocked!
Bullshit. None of the feverish puzzle-boxing in Lost paid off (the Maze in Westworld is no different than the Numbers from Lost), and it won’t here, either. (And it’s no coincidence that both shows are produced by one-trick pony and hack extraordinaire J. J. Abrams. Just like on Lost and Game of Thrones before them, the writers of Westworld are absolutely making every bit of that series up week-to-week; don’t trust them for a minute when they insist they “know how it all ends.” Ask yourself where you’ve heard that before.)
I do believe, though, that we will eventually grow fatigued with that kind of empty-promise, don’t-you-dare-miss-a-single-installment storytelling — spoiler-dependent series that value surprise over story — and, as Rushkoff puts it, ache for more prescriptive narratives. For that, though, we’ll need disciplined, trustworthy storytellers working in every available mode of narrativity — the screen, the stage, the page — and essays like “The Road Back” are my earnest plea for our culture to nurture them.
And there I thought the Hero’s journey was a done deal! This is a fascinating read, Sean, thank you. As a massive fan of The Sopranos (watched it twice through, a few years apart, and found it even better the second time around) and also Breaking Bad, I would love to get into that with you at some point! Hubby and I recently rewatched the Godfather trilogy during lockdown and with these shows in mind as I read your post, I see exactly where you are coming from. Another angle, my youngest adult son (the one with Asperger’s) is a big fan of horror films and has introduced us to more recent ones like Midsommer and Heritage. Nothing like the horror films of old, are they? Completely different storytelling. And of course with epics like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, we have another contrast. Classic hero’s journey, loved the ending of the first, hated it in GOT. But we could talk all day about this. I need to come back and reread and properly digest this. If the hero’s journey is fading, or practically gone, from books, the entire face of publishing has also changed. So much to discuss! For now, I need to get back to that memoir and how to pitch it in this ever changing industry.
I wasn’t the one who identified the collapse of traditional storytelling, Sherri; a media theorist named Douglas Rushkoff, who’s been influential on my writings, first proffered the concept of postnarrativity in his 2013 nonfiction book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, the first chapter of which is titled “Narrative Collapse.” I highly recommend the book, but you can get an overview from this blog post I published shortly after first reading it: “Journey’s End.”
The notion of postnarrative fiction was so revelatory to me, and yet when I first discussed it with colleagues here in Hollywood, most of them were fairly dismissive of it, arguing instead that Rushkoff was merely pointing out the difference between standalone and serialized storytelling. But postnarrativity is about so much more than that: It’s about a worldview that rejects heroic journeys with conclusive and cathartic endings. Game of Thrones is to The Lord of the Rings as The Sopranos is to The Godfather: Whereas the latter are closed-ended, three-act hero’s journeys with definitive conclusions (and takeaway morals), the former are “not about creating satisfying resolutions, but rather about keeping the adventure alive and as many threads going as possible. There is plot — there are many plots — but there is no overarching story, no end. There are so many plots, in fact, that an ending tying everything up seems inconceivable, even beside the point” (Rushkoff, Present Shock, 34).
I’ve never seen Breaking Bad — it’s just one of those shows that got away from me with the deluge of TV options in our streaming reality — but I wrote a long treatise on Game of Thrones after its finale aired called “Game Over” that addresses why viewers who were watching the series to see how it ended were destined from episode one to be disappointed. (Personally, I think Benioff and Weiss are terrible writers — for reasons I elaborate on here — whom we inexplicably deified, only to belatedly discover that they hadn’t actually known what they were doing all along!)
Ari Aster (director of Hereditary and Midsommar) and Robert Eggers (The Witch and The Lighthouse) are two promising young filmmakers who are honoring and invoking the aesthetics of old-school horror cinema without literally reviving the IPs that inspired them and then making their own glorified fan fiction, as David Gordon Green has done with Halloween. Aster and Eggers are exactly the kind of storytellers I cite a need for in the above essay. (And if you’re looking for some old-school scares this Halloween, the New York Times has some suggestions.)
For reasons I discussed in my reply to Diana above, I think there’s still hope for prescriptive storytelling in publishing. But it’s also important to recognize that the novelists of the future will be exposed to far less cathartic narrativity — because most of the stories we consume (even we avid readers) comes from television — which is why they’ll need to be explicitly taught the Campbellian Hero’s Journey. That’s not to say they’ll have to follow it, but it’ll make them better, more creative artists if they understand there is a conventional narrative pattern — that there are time-honored storytelling principles — amidst all the anything-goes fiction of cynical movie mega-franchises and endless “prestige” TV series.
(I just read two excellent monomythic novels, in fact: The Deep by Rivers Solomon, a brilliant, heartbreaking, and lyrical take on the mermaid legend, and Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a south-of-the-border Wuthering Heights.)
Good luck with your memoir! Do keep us informed on its progress!
P.S. I slugged in a link to your post “Welcome To My World” in your response above, because I want to encourage my followers to read it.
As an English major with a minor in Film Studies, I find this fascinating. Last week, I finished rewatching all seven seasons of Sons of Anarchy, and I wonder where something like that fits in. It’s based on the Shakespearian tragedy model (particularly Hamlet) and watching it again, I really saw it–from the slow descent of the hero to the restoration of moral order that the hero’s death is supposed to create. Even though it took seven years to get there, I thought it was still a fairly traditional narrative in a lot of ways. On a side note, I have to say that it ended with what was quite possibly the worst green screen special effect I’ve ever seen–really destroyed the beauty of the previous to last sequence!
Like Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy is a show I never got around to, despite hearing only good things. Given that, Suzanne, I can’t speak to what the show’s creative intentions may’ve been. As a story form, postnarrativity hasn’t really been codified like the Aristotelian arc, other than our acknowledgement here of its creative imperative to challenge the linearity, catharsis, and individualistic values of the Hero’s Journey, as is the case with
Does Sons of Anarchy belong in the latter grouping? Perhaps. My concern lies less with codifying postnarrativity than simply recognizing that narrative itself has mutated — that it no longer reliably follows that monomythic arrangement of the past 2,000 years. Clearly, postnarrative content creators who recognize they are working in a different form, like David Chase with The Sopranos, fare better creatively than those who fail to acknowledge it — like Damon Lindelof (Lost), Benioff and Weiss (Game of Thrones), and George R. R. Martin, who still insists A Song of Ice and Fire is a piece of cyclical storytelling in the vein of The Lord of the Rings. (It isn’t.)
But if Sons of Anarchy concluded satisfactorily — bad green-screen work be damned! — then its creators did right by it. The Sopranos ended on a satisfactorily inconclusive grace note — provided the viewer understood there was never going to be any catharsis offered in exchange for his time and attention.
It is a fascinating subject, isn’t it? Such is the reason I keep revisiting these themes on my blog — because they’re worth discussing, debating, and understanding. Thanks for always joining the conversation, Suzanne!
when I 1st read that book, I felt like my head exploded lol like it described life so well in addition to story telling. would you be so kind as to guest blog post for my site? if you’re so inclined, here’s a link to general guidelines: https://wp.me/p6OZAy-1eQ
Indeed, da-AL. “This way of organizing stories — Joseph Campbell’s ‘heroic journey’ — is now our way of understanding the world. This may have happened because the linear structure is essentially true to life, or we may simply have gotten so accustomed to it that it now informs the way we look at events and problems that emerge” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now [New York: Penguin Group, 2013], 20).
For the past two decades, we haven’t been able to get enough of TV dramas that keep us in a vicarious state of sustained “presentism,” from The Sopranos to Lost to Game of Thrones to Westworld. My hope is that we are so weary from living in an actual state of presentism — starting with the election of Trump, and culminating in the stay-at-home year of 2020 — that when we’re on the other side of the pandemic, we’ll ache once again for narratives that provide closure and catharsis, that offer the clarity of a path forward rather than the vertiginous high of spinning in circles.
Yes, I would love to guest-blog at Happiness between Tails! Let me mull over a prospective idea and reach out to you in the coming weeks…
Thanks so much for stopping by to join the conversation, da-AL! My best to you for a happy and healthy 2021!