Let me again pick up a standard that has fallen on our literary battlefield: the standard that marks the entrance of The Defender of The Common. It would seem a silly thing to need to defend common things, but in truth we have grown quite accustomed to tearing down good things simply because great things exist. Those who do such things are either ignorant or bullies. If ignorant, then the remedy is wonder. Education. If bullies, the response is to defend the common. Why? Because it is petty to make fun of a child for making a fort simply because he’s not a man who made a castle. Every mason who built the pyramids began as a boy making mud pies and the goodness of that childhood tinkering whispers a prophecy fulfilled in towers. With this spirit, I plan to defend common things and the thing I defend today is The Hero’s Journey as well as offer a monomyth definition to help us bridge the gap between theories on storytelling.

The Hero’s Journey is a way of explaining stories and myths and fables found in The Hero with 1,000 Faces, a book by Joseph Campbell. It’s a cycle he called “the monomyth.” Here’s your monomyth definition: Campbell believed that all myths told one story. Well he was right on story and wrong on myth, for the phrase “comparative religion” is an oxymoron. I’ll digress on that point only for three sentences in order to focus our monomyth definition. For one, it’s hard to imagine a college freshman’s 101 class forbidding students to write essays contrasting two subjects, but such essays have no place in the world of comparative myth. It’s as bad as if some Memoir 101 teacher forbade her pupils to write personal essay and in fact that’s exactly how absurd it is when we merely compare religions — including non-faith or anti-faith — since each lays claim to The Incomparable. So I think anyone who critiques Campbell by saying he erred on mythology — specifically where it touches philosophy and metaphysics — is right.

But to say Campbell’s books have no value for the author because they create a system and a monomyth definition is at best ignorant, is potentially misguided, and is at worst a downright refusal to face the facts. Cultures may have serious differences in their mythologies but to say that they have no similarities in the nature of story per se is to say that a nostril does one thing in Chad that it does not do in Canada. Certainly nostrils may smell maple syrup in the north and daraba in the south, but no one would say that a Chadian uses his nose to smell whereas a Canadian uses his to see. The definitions we have of what story is in modern history all come from Campbell’s recent distillation of the so-called monomyth. Our good friend and mentor Ms. Lisa Cron said at UnCon that story:

“…is about how what happens affects someone in pursuit of a deceptively difficult goal, and how that person changes internally as a result. That someone needs two things: something they want really, really badly and then what I call a misbelief that usually was deeply ingrained early in life, it’s actually what’s keeping them from getting it.”

McKee in Story says:

“For better or worse, an event throws a character’s life out of balance, arousing in him the conscious and/or conscious desire for that which he feels will restore balance, launching him on a Quest for his Object of Desire against forces of antagonism (inner, personal, extra-personal). He may or may not achieve it.”

And then there’s Dan Harmon’s one-sentence summary of The Hero’s Journey, a one-sentence monomyth definition:

“A hero is in a zone of comfort, but he wants something, so he enters an unfamiliar situation, adapts, get what he wants, pays a heavy price, and returns to comfort having changed.”

In essence, you see, they’re all saying the exact same thing Stephen King says in Danse Macabre. Story reveals a war between our Apollonian ideals and our Dionysian comforts. Stephen Pressfield would say story manifests itself in our daily life through “The War of Art,” because any time we try to do something high and noble, resistance gets in the way. We have status quo — life and our comforts — and then we have that thing we deeply desire which will change our situation if we take courage and pursue it. Generally the comfort side of things is so strong, is so habitually used to self-medicate our past traumas, that we don’t even understand our goals ourselves. Those two sides of us, our comfortable misbelief and our goal, war with one another both internally and externally. Any time we seek something high and noble, resistance rises up and gets in the way in the form of fatty foods and family drama and festering limbs and fevers and failing ecosystems and frigate skirmishes and fettishes.

Stated formally, The Hero’s Journey simply describes how any given story works and it goes something like this: