I owe my old writing prof Ross Laird something of an apology.
One of Ross's key idea was the importance of myth to contemporary writing. We spent a lot of time on the Hero's Journey, and he mentioned Joseph Campbell a number of times. Campbell is the author of Hero With a Thousand Faces, a book which argues that the similarities between myth, legend, fairy tale and religious parable point to a "monomyth." In other words, all stories tell the same basic, universal story. It's an idea which influenced George Lucas and the Matrix guys, and many many others, especially in Hollywood.
Most people (writers anyway) come to the Hero's Journey not from Campbell's book, but from a book called The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler. Vogler takes Campbell's work and forms it into an outline that all screenplays (he suggests) follow. You're probably familiar with the various steps and archetypes: Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Meeting with the Mentor, Battle with the Threshold Guardian, etc.
Now, my pitiful attempts at screenwriting did or didn't fall into that pattern, but I never found it useful in writing. It's like the saying "Every story has a beginning, middle and end." It sounds profound, is undoubtedly true, but gives you no help in creating a story, any more than saying "A Frankenstein has a head, a trunk and feet.*" It's sententious horse pockey.
I've found that going back to the original book is always invaluable, and is the only way to scoop any original insight. So I read Hero With a Thousand Faces, and now I understand the value of the monomyth, and exactly where Vogler goes wrong.
What Campbell describes isn't structure but purpose. The Journey is about the many ways that these aspects of the myth promote or hide their adherence to the monomyth. For instance, the Refusal of the Call in Vogler is a time early on when the hero tries to turn away from the quest but can't. In Campbell, the Refusal might be a myth unto itself, as in the myth of King Minos. Minos refuses to relinquish his throne, denying the gods their sacrifice. Thus he becomes a tyrant, and his wife gives birth to a Minotaur. That myth is almost entirely Refusal; Vogler turns it into a stepping stone.
Here's Campbell:
And here's Vogler:
(borrowed from wondering-mind.blogspot.com )
It's not a matter of "My story has to have these steps," but instead, "Chances are my story will emphasize some or most (or one) of these steps."
See the difference? See where everyone goes wrong? The same watering-down happens to any major thinker's work, from Freud to Jesus. Doubtless it will happen to mine.
As I started by saying, I owe Ross Laird an apology. I rejected outright what Vogler had to say, but should have given Campbell a chance a bit sooner.
The value of Campbell is not in an outline, but in the insight that the story a writer is trying to tell has been told before—and needs to be told again. To some people that insight could be worthless, another half-baked idea to rail against as you write a story with "no places, no spaces, no races" and try to be "experimental" (read: deliberately boring, but couched in enough Lacanian jargon that anyone who calls you on your shit "just doesn't understand" or is too "bourgeois". Die in a fire, buddy.).
One valuable thing from Vogler, which David Mamet also repeats, is the similarity between the journey of the hero/protagonist and that of the writer. I find this especially comforting, knowing that the doubts and indecisions one encounters as a writer mimic those faced by one's characters.
It would be interesting and useful, I think, to apply Campbell's journey to ALL one's characters, and note how each emphasizes different aspects of the journey. To me that's a much more interesting use than as an outline. I'm not anti-outline, I just believe they should be generated by the material, not grafted on externally. Writing is not stencilling, there's no set template, and it wouldn't be worth doing if there was.
Campbell's work has a spiritual overtone that pure academics won't be comfortable with, but it should be read and returned to. Vogler's book should prove an interesting appendix, NOT a popular summary. Campbell's book offers an understanding of the comparative skeletons of cultural fictions. Vogler's book offers the chance to earn Matrix money. That's valuable too, but it's meant to appeal to a different demographic, one eager for a formula. There ain't no formula.
* And before some asshole points out that the monster isn't called Frankenstein, the Doctor is: the whole story is about parenthood, about a man who creates life. Mary Shelley suffered a miscarriage shortly before writing it. What better name for the creation than its father's? If anything, "The Monster" is the truly misleading moniker, because it downplays the putative humanity of the creation, which is the center of the book's philosophy.
From the Swintec website: 
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