I wanted to know, could plugging the most obvious characters, setting, and situation into a very basic story frame result in a book that people would actually and truly love? And while I was at it, could I improve my plot-creation skills? The result is the half-written novel, The Journey of Clement Fancywater, which will probably be seeing publication around New Years, because darned if I didn’t write something somewhat innovative despite myself. So I came up with a writing challenge (with the help of Camp NaNoWriMo) to write 50,000 words of a new novel during the month of April and base it entirely off of the hero’s journey. And the reason I read that was as fodder for a writing experiment of my own. It began with a reading of Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, which may well be a more widely read reinterpretation, these days. I came at Campbell (at least consciously) through a more modern portal. In the 50s, he took a trip to India and Asia, which strengthened his interest in comparative mythology and religion, and he spent the rest of his life lecturing to the layman about it. He became a professor at Sarah Lawrence college and lived with his wife in Greenwich Village. He spent the Great Depression holed up with his books in a shack in upstate New York, and the time afterward hob-knobbing with some California literary elite. After a chance meeting of an Indian man, Campbell became interested in Hinduism. He had degrees in English and Medieval Literature, and studied various languages in Europe. Although he was skilled in athletics (especially running) and the hard sciences, he was drawn to the humanities. Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was a lecturer and mythologist who was known for his work in comparative mythology and religion. The concept is still studied and used, and has vehement opposition and staunch followers, but mostly, I think, an army of in-between writers and readers who are affected, consciously or otherwise, by Campbell’s game-changing approach to story. These stages are known today as the hero’s journey. He proposed that myths throughout history and space share fundamental structures and stages, which he enumerated in the book. Joseph Campbell pinpointed and explored the concept, culminating his studies and teachings in The Hero With a Thousand Faces. What is the “hero’s journey?” The hero’s journey–also known as the monomyth–is a widely distributed, perhaps universal, pattern in the narratives of the world, throughout time. The original was published in 1949 by Pantheon Books.īefore I begin my review of this particular book, I want to answer a question for those of you who don’t know the answer. The Hero With a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell and published in the third edition by New World Publishing in 2008.

The hero has a thousand faces