hero's journey examples in literature

The Hero’s Journey: 12 Steps That Make Up the Universal Structure of Great Stories

by David Safford | 0 comments

At some in your writer's life, you've probably come across the term Hero's Journey. Maybe you've even studied this guide for storytelling and applied it to your own books—and yet, something about your own application felt off. You wanted to learn more, but didn't know where to start.

Maybe you needed a resource that would simplify the hero's journey steps and all the other major details instead of complicate them.

The Hero's Journey is as old as humanity itself. And through history, this single story form has emerged over and over again. People from all cultures have seemed to favor its structure, and its familiar types of characters (archetypal hero, anyone?), symbols, relationships, and steps.

If you want to build or strengthen your writing career and win a following of many happy readers, you want this particular tool in your writer's toolbox.

Let's dive in.

Need help applying The Hero's Journey to your story outline and manuscript? Download this free Hero's Journey worksheet now!

Why I Love the Hero's Journey (And You Will, Too)

Like many, I grew up loving Star Wars. I especially loved the music and bought the soundtracks at some point in middle school. When my parents weren't home and I had the house all to myself, I'd slip one of the CDs into my stereo, crank the volume up, and blast the London Symphony Orchestra. I even pretended I was conducting the violins and timpani myself.

I know it's nerdy to admit. But we love what we love, and I love the music of great movies.

In a way, the Hero's Journey is like a soundtrack. It follows familiar beats and obeys age-old principles of human emotion. We can't necessarily explain why a piece of music is so beautiful, but we can explain what it does and simply acknowledge that most people like it.

As I've come to understand Joseph Campbell's groundbreaking monomyth theory, commonly known as the Hero's Journey, I've fallen deeper and deeper in love with it.

But it's important to make sure you know what it is, and what it isn't.

The Hero's Journey isn't a formula to simply follow, plugging in hackneyed characters into cliched situations.

It's not “selling out” and giving up your artistic integrity

The Hero's Journey is a set of steps, scenes, character types, symbols, and themes that tend to recur in stories regardless of culture or time period. Within these archetypes are nearly infinite variations and unique perspectives that are impacted by culture and period, reflecting wonderful traits of the authors and audiences.

Also, the Hero's Journey is a process that your reader expects your story to follow, whether they know it or not. This archetype is hard-wired into our D.N.A. Let's look at how to use it to make your own stories stronger.

How to Use This Hero's Journey Post

In the beginning, there were stories. These stories were told by mothers, soldiers, and performers. They were inscribed on the walls of caves, into tablets of stone, and on the first sheets of papyrus.

This is how the Hero's Journey was born.

In this post, I'll walk you through the Hero's Journey twelve steps, and teach you how to apply them into your story. I'll also share additional resources to teach you some other Hero's Journey essentials, like character archetypes, symbols, and themes. By the end of this post, you'll be able to easily apply the Hero's Journey to your story with confidence.

And don't skip out on the practice exercise at the end of the post! This will help you start to carve out the Hero's Journey for your story with a practical fifteen minute exercise—the best way to really retain how the Hero's Journey works is to apply it.

Table of Contents: The Hero's Journey Guide

What is the Hero's Journey?

Why the Hero's Journey will make you a better writer

The Twelve-Step Hero's Journey Structure

• The Ordinary World
• The Call to Adventure
• The Refusal of the Call
• Meeting the Mentor
• Crossing the Threshold
• Trials, Allies, and Enemies
• The Approach
• The Road Back
• The Resurrection
• Return With the Elixir

5 Essential Hero's Journey Scenes

A Guide to Structuring Your Hero's Journey

Bonus! Additional Hero's Journey Resources

• 5 Character Archetypes
• 5 Hero's Journey Symbols
• 5 Hero's Journey Themes

What Is the Hero's Journey?

The Hero's Journey is the timeless combination of characters, events, symbols, and relationships frequently structured as a sequence of twelve steps. It is a storytelling structure that anyone can study and utilize to tell a story that readers will love.

First identified and defined by Joseph Campbell, the Hero's Journey was theorizied in The Hero With a Thousand Faces . Today, it has been researched and taught by great minds, some including Carl Jung and Christopher Vogler (author of The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers ).

This research has given us lengthy and helpful lists of archetypes , or story elements that tend to recur in stories from any culture at any time.

And while some archetypes are unique to a genre, they are still consistent within those genres. For example, a horror story from Japan will still contain many of the same archetypes as a horror story from Ireland. There will certainly be notable differences in how these archetypes are depicted, but the tropes will still appear.

That's the power of the Hero's Journey. It is the skeleton key of storytelling that you can use to unlock the solution to almost any writing problem you are confronted with.

Why the Monomyth Will Make You a Better Writer

The Hero's Journey is the single most powerful tool at your disposal as a writer.

But it isn't a “rule,” so to speak. It's also not a to-do list.

If anything, the Hero's Journey is diagnostic, not prescriptive. In other words, it describes a story that works, but doesn't necessarily tell you what to do.

But the reason you should use the Hero's Journey isn't because it's a great trick or tool. You should use the Hero's Journey because it is based on thousands of years of human storytelling.

It provides a way to connect with readers from all different walks of life.

This is why stories about fantastical creatures from imaginary worlds can forge deep emotional connections with audiences. Hollywood knows this, and its best studios take advantage. As an example, The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien, contains mythical creatures like elves and hobbits. Yet it is Frodo's heroic journey of sacrifice and courage that draws us to him like a magnet.

Learn how to easily apply the Hero's Journey 12 Steps to your books in this post. Tweet this

1. Divide Your Story Into 3 Acts

How does Three-Act Structure overlap with a Twelve-Step Hero's Journey? It's actually not that complicated. Usually, the Three-Act Hero's Journey looks like this.

Act 1 = Steps 1 through 5

The Beginning of your story shows the reader the Hero's Ordinary World, their Call to Adventure and Refusal, the introduction and early work of the Mentor, and the Hero's “Choice to Go,” or Crossing of the Threshold.

Act 2 = Step 6

Yup. All of Act Two, the Middle Build, is a single Step: Trials, Allies, and Enemies. This is why it's essential to realize that this Step uses the entire twelve-step structure within itself, and must put the Hero to the test a number of times on their journey toward the final goal.

Act 3 = Steps 7 through 12

The Ending of the story begins when the Hero pauses to Approach the final Ordeal. It then proceeds to the major Ordeal, the Reward and consequential false ending, any Road Back that may be involved, the ultimate showdown resulting in Resurrection, and the Hero's triumphant Return with the Elixir.

2. Use Word Counts to Plan Your Drafting

There are benefits to generating an idea of how many words and chapters you should be writing. If that sounds like too much planning for you, consider this question: Do you like wasting time?

I don't. And I'd prefer to waste as little as possible. That's one of the great benefits of planning your writing with word counts in mind.

Knowing a rough estimate of how a Hero's Journey could break down by the numbers can help you plan, write, and edit a novel with a steady and strong pace. And simultaneously, it's likely that this road map will give you even more motivation to finish your story.

You might also consider devoting certain percentages of your time to the Beginning, Middle, and Ending of your book, which I'll cover more in a future post.

3. Specifically Plan Your Steps

Once you've made upon a rough word count estimate, you can plan your steps quite deliberately. As you complete this process, you can alter your estimate as well.

With this kind of plan in place, you can determine when it's time to move on to the next step as you draft. This isn't to “follow the rules,” but to stay attuned to the kind of stories that readers love and have loved for thousands of years.

With this in mind, you'll be able to use the Hero's Journey as a guide that provides a massive canvas for you to freely paint upon—and one that will come in extreme convenience as you study and apply the Twelve-Step Hero's Journey.

Hero's Journey Examples

Learning these concepts one-by-one is certainly useful, but might not help you see the power in a well-told, well-structured Hero's Journey story.

In order to really master the Hero's Journey, you can explore popular books and films that use these steps and archetypes with expert artistry.

These three examples were a turning point in my writing career while studying the Hero's Journey:

Example #1: Star Wars

Perhaps the most obvious Hero's Journey example, Star Wars  contains a feast of archetypes and structural choices that will help us see Campbell's work in action.

As an appetizer, I explore some Hero's Journey essentials in Star Wars in its own post. In it, I discuss topics like the ways Luke Skywalker is an ideal Hero,  and how on his journey, Luke faces the villainous Darth Vader, the story's Shadow . And who could forget the mysterious supernatural aid: Luke's Mentor , Obi-wan?

Whether you love or hate George Lucas's space opus (and/or what Disney has done with it since 2012), the films of the Star Wars  universe are excellent examples to study and learn from.

Learn more: Discover ALL the ways  Star Wars  uses archetypes here!

Example #2: Toy Story

Few Hollywood studios regularly utilize the Hero's Journey to incredible effect more than Pixar. In its first outing, Toy Story,  Pixar successfully told two  Hero's Journeys for both Sheriff Woody and Buzz Lightyear. In subsequent sequels, it would recapture the magic, taking its cowboy protagonist along a sequence of heroic steps that resonant with the human experience.

For example, Woody begins in an Ordinary World  in which he comfortably runs Andy's bedroom; he's Called to Adventure  when a new toy arrives and challenges him for the role of Andy's favorite toy; and he Refuses the Call  by choosing a crooked path, in which he attempts to have Buzz knocked into a corner where Andy won't find him.

As you can imagine, the story continues from there, with Woody and Buzz split between two worlds, and our heroes choices seem to perfectly follow the Hero's Journey as they attempt to reunite with Andy and forge a relationship that isn't purely antagonistic.

Beloved by generations of audiences, Toy Story  is an ideal work to focus on as we study Campbell's work.

I ‘ll breakdown the Hero's Journey Twelve Steps in this iconic film in a future post. 

Example #3: The Hunger Games

The dystopian genre is filled with unlucky heroes who realize that their worlds are broken, only to rise up against invincible forces. In one of the most popular of these stories, Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games,  follows a dirt-poor girl on a quest to unseat a tyrant and bring justice to Panem. As you certainly expected, The Hunger Games  is a perfect case study of the power of myth to bring a fantastic world into stark reality.

For example, Katniss Everdeen, the story's hero, follows in the footsteps of many other protagonists by bearing a Magic Weapon,  or object that seems to heighten the hero's powers and reveal his/her greatness.

Once out of her comfort zone, she endures numerous Tests and Trials,  including the lengthy Task  of surviving the Hunger Games themselves. Along the way she enters a Belly of the Beast,  or cave, where she must nurse her partner Peta back to health. And in the story's gripping conclusion, Katniss must survive an onslaught of Creatures of Nightmare  as the “Mutts” swarm the Cornucopia where she and Peta must make their last stand.

These situations, symbols, and more appear all throughout the Hunger Games trilogy, and I'll share exactly how these Hero's Journey essentials apply in a future post. 

Additional Examples of The Hero's Journey

These three stories are by no means the only examples of the monomyth executed to perfection. Some other stories great for analyzing the Hero's Journey could include:

• The Lord of the Rings,  by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Harry Potter,  by J.K. Rowling
• Pixar's Ratatouille
• Pixar's WALL-E
• Back to the Future
• The Great Gatsby
• Pride and Prejudice,  by Jane Austen
• Alien and Aliens  (directed by Ridley Scott and James Cameron, respectively)

BONUS! Additional Hero's Journey Resources

Applying the Hero's Journey steps to your story will connect with readers on a human level. However, that's not the only insight you can learn from the Hero's Journey. If you're up for it, learn more about why the Hero's Journey touches readers with these bonus essentials.

Hero's Journey Character Archetypes

Every story begins with great characters, and the Hero's Journey is the study of recurring character types , known as archetypes.

A character archetype is a character type that serves a specific role in a story and tends to reoccur in myths, legends, and stories across genres, cultures, and time periods.

In order to be properly utilized, a character archetype must fulfill its set purpose while exhibiting new, innovative traits. There are several important character archetypes used in heroic storylines—especially these five: hero, shadow, loyal retainer, mentor, and threshold guardians.

Learn more: Hero's Journey Character archetypes that will make your story awesome

5 Hero's Journey Symbols to Use

A Hero's Journey Symbol, also known as a symbolic archetype , is an object, location, or image in a story that contains more than one functional meaning. It has both a physical meaning in the story world and a thematic meaning for the reader to interpret.

Within your Hero's Journey scenes and relationships, you can use objects and small events to add even more thematic significance to your story.

Read more about five effective Hero's Journey symbols here:

1. “Light vs. Darkness” Symbol

2. “Magic Weapon” Symbol

3. “Underworld” Symbol

4. “Castle” Symbol

5. “Unhealable Wound” Symbol

5 Hero's Journey Themes to Explore

A Hero's Journey Theme is a relationship between two opposite ideas or elements. Throughout the story, the pros and cons of each idea/element are explored, with the Hero making high stakes choices in the context of this conflict-filled relationship. The conclusions the reader comes to about this relationship are its themes.

Read about five favored Hero's Journey themes in these posts:

1.   “Good vs. Evil” Thematic Relationship

2. “ Have n vs. Wildnerness” Thematic Relationship

3. “Nature vs. Machine” Thematic Relationship

4. “Father vs. Son” Thematic Relationship

5. “Sibling vs. Sibling” Thematic Relationship

It's Time to Tell Your Hero's Journey

Star Wars, Toy Story,  and The Hunger Games  are just three members of a near-limitless collection of stories, new and old, that use the Hero's Journey structure and archetypes to thrill readers.

The next, I hope, will be written by you!

Use the Hero's Journey Twelve Steps to outline, write, and/or edit your book—and touch all your readers on a human level.

Have you applied the Hero's Journey to your stories  before? How did it go?  Let us know in the comments .

There's no way to write a full Hero's Journey novel in just fifteen minutes. But you  can plot out your next story according to the Hero's Journey, which is what I encourage you to do.

For today, spend fifteen minutes writing a story premise that (1) you're eager to write, and (2) you can use to outline the Hero's Journey. Then, if you're up for it, journal about how the twelve steps in the Hero's Journey could apply to this story idea.

Write your ideas in the Pro Practice Workshop here . When you're done, leave some feedback for your fellow writers, as well!

David Safford

You deserve a great book. That's why David Safford writes adventure stories that you won't be able to put down. Read his latest story at his website. David is a Language Arts teacher, novelist, blogger, hiker, Legend of Zelda fanatic, puzzle-doer, husband, and father of two awesome children.

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