The Hero and Heroine's Journey by Lauren Daniels

‘I’ve been working on a novel for years but it’s going in circles.’

‘My memoir needs a theme to structure it. I just don’t know what it is.’

‘Literary arc…character arc…what’s the difference?’

Bogged writers and heroic tales are my speciality. As an author/editor hybrid, I seek models to use and share with others who also get stuck. Everything from personality theories to the periodical table and the tarot can help stories find their form. The hero and heroine’s journeys also make gracious scaffolding, allowing our stories to emerge anew.

In 1988, Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth interviews at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch first aired. I was seventeen and while much of the content blew past me, I sensed fuel for the writing life. When he said things like ‘I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child’—I’d found a friend for life.

The hero’s journey—or monomyth—is everywhere. Disney’s The Mandolorian and The Witcher on Netflix mainstreamed it again and it’s all over speculative fiction. For nonfiction, the monomyth helps people fashion their lives into memoir. Sculptor, Sabin Howard, used it to create A Soldier’s Journey, a visual narrative of one man’s story for the National World War I Memorial in Washington, DC. The hero’s journey passes from the ordinary to the extraordinary world and back again through confrontation, transformation and sacrifice. It sets the stage for fiction, and it can tap into the magic of our lives.

A few years ago, I was teaching Campbell’s monomyth at the Tasmanian Writers Centre when someone asked if we’d cover the heroine’s journey. I apologised for the bias and started researching. Through my reading, I found Maureen Murdoch, a student who challenged Campbell’s ‘women don’t need to go on the journey’ response. Murdoch developed her own model for the heroine’s journey, followed by others like Anne Davin and Clarissa Pinkola Estés. They claim that while masculine and feminine experiences overlap, there are differences. Like Yin and Yang, a great wellspring awaits us writers, a place to energise our stories.

Russian folk heroine, Vasalisa the Wise, for example, is not on the hero’s journey. Neither is Juliet Mariller’s protagonist, Sorcha, in Daughter of the Forest, inspired by the folktale, The Six Swans, collected by the Brothers Grimm. They don’t have the same milestones, crossings and confrontations as a knight who slays a beast. The strength they cultivate does not wield a sword. It lies in their diligence and patience; they outsmart and endure, often with ancestral wisdom and compassion driving them.

Great awakenings unfold when we peer at our stories—fiction or non—through the lens of these archetypal encounters. We know in our bones that when we answer the call, we’re grown by the writing process. We transform, and if we’re open enough, we can make old stories new again.

Lauren Daniels course The Hero & Heroine’s Journey is scheduled for 25 Jan 2020 at the Writers Centre and as a live stream.