It was sometime around 2012 that I first got tapped on the shoulder by the ghost of this young girl born into a sort of forest utopia. Catastrophe falls on her people—in the form of the downstream effects of toxic agriculture—and she has to fight her way back to the source to fix the problem.
This felt like familiar ground to me. I’m a fantasy writer; I’ve venerated the Hero’s Journey ever since I first read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces in my early 20s. I can spot a Hero’s Journey a mile away on a foggy day. I knew where this was going.
Seventy years ago, the literature professor Joseph Campbell’s personal charisma and power as a teacher broke the idea of a heroic quest monomyth free from academia and turned it loose onto the world. One ordinary man in the ordinary world hears the Call to Adventure. He refuses the Call for a while, but eventually commits and steps over the threshold into a strange and difficult Journey on which he undergoes Trials and Temptations, before finally winning through to his goal and bringing back The Boon to his people.
George Lucas splashed this Hero’s Journey on screens around the world through his blockbuster Star Wars. Bill Moyers splashed it on another kind of screen with his popular PBS series The Power of Myth. Christopher Vogler turned it into Hollywood gospel with his screenwriting guide The Writer’s Journey. The Hero’s Journey has percolated out from these sources to shape our dreams, stories, and waking world relatively unchallenged for three-quarters of a century, but our world today is aching for new possibilities. ALL SFF writers today are in some kind of relationship—struggle or assent—with this towering Hero.
Like all Campbell-style Heroes, my main character Pyn-Poi would hear a call to adventure. She would probably resist that call for a while, and then eventually commit herself to The Quest. On that Quest, she would be tested by riddles, challenges, and ordeals, but—finding unexpected tools and helpers along the way—she would win through and circle back in triumph, bringing her people the long-sought good thing: in Pyn-Poi’s case the boon of environmental healing.
That’s what I thought would happen as my main character Pyn-Poi kept pushing onward with her Hero’s Journey.
But years passed. Pages piled up, hundreds of pages.
The trouble was: I couldn’t find a way to get Pyn-Poi back with the goods.
As Joseph Campbell tells it, the Hero always brings the boon back to the people, right? The Journey is always drawn as a circle, always with a Going Forth, and always with a Coming Back with the good stuff. But every way I twisted and contorted the plot to force Pyn-Poi’s quest to succeed just seemed to make the book feel cheesy and contrived, not what would really happen in a real world, not even a fantasy real world.
I kept getting emails from my worried best friend: “Have you gotten the rainforest girl out of that hell-camp yet?”
And I hadn’t. I couldn’t.
I’m not saying that I consciously tried to force my story to fit Campbell’s template—I’m not that kind of writer. But, looking back on it, I can see that our beloved Hero’s Journey had a chokehold on me.
It was the story itself that shook me free. I let the book lead me where it wanted to go. And this is what I think about that:
There are aspects of the Hero’s “Journey”—in real life, in myth, and in fiction—that just aren’t mapped out by Campbell’s schema.
Martin Luther King, Jr., didn’t live to see Barack Obama in the White House—but John Lewis did. Moses didn’t get to lead his people into the Promised Land—but Joshua did. Frodo didn’t get to live out his years in a healed and peaceful Shire—but Sam did.
When Linda Falcao, a fierce feminist attorney, first read Pyn-Poi’s story in The Night Field, she said that the “single best thing about this book” was that the Hero’s Journey in it “is not a solitary one, and it may never come to fruition in the Hero’s own lifetime.”
She went on to say that in the world outside books it often takes two generations to make real change. First, you need an idealist naïve enough—crazy enough—to believe that change can happen. I think of 16-year-old Pyn-Poi as she starts off on her long climb, but you could also think of the 15-year-old Greta Thunberg standing in front of the Swedish Parliament in 2018, holding up her “School Strike for Climate” sign. That girl stood there for three solid weeks and lit up a global firestorm that’s still blazing today.
It’s the very idealism of the initiating hero that drives them to draw swords against the dragons that a more “realistic” person wouldn’t dream of tackling. But those constant battle-blows can wear down this initiating Stage One Hero, maybe break their heart, make them give up, even kill them.
But the story doesn’t end there. A second person comes along, someone who in the past has more or less gone along with the dragons; think of Chief in Ken Kesey’s classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Silent, passive Chief is inspired by McMurphy’s efforts to escape from the asylum. Stage Two Heroes are fired up by the courage, creativity, and hope of Stage One Heroes to act in ways they never dared to try before. McMurphy never wins his freedom from the mental hospital—but Chief does.
Actually, not having even tried before may be the Stage Two Hero’s superpower, because they haven’t yet been ground down by struggle; their hearts are undamaged enough to pick up the Quest and carry it forward for the next lap. (And also, they haven’t gotten on anyone’s radar yet; the dragons never see them coming.)
The spark can jump from one hero to another in the real world also. Greta Thunberg’s climate protest was itself actually inspired by another protest a few months earlier: the Florida-based anti-gun protest March for Our Lives led by the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students.
That fiery feminist reader of mine went on to tell me that highlighting how a Quest is shared between heroes (like my Pyn-Poi and her friend Lakka) honors the real experience of women, whose lives and work—whether from nature or nurture—lean towards collaboration.
The vision of the solitary Hero’s Journey is a dangerous ideal, not just because it disrespects the lived experience of women, but also because it perpetuates the lie that “the true hero always goes it alone and gets it all done by himself.” It misrepresents how real change happens in the real world.
The stories we imagine shape the stories we can live. Glorifying individualistic quests can hamstring real change by isolating potential heroes from each other, by hiding from them the fact that, whether they are a kick-off Stage One Hero or a follow-up Stage Two Hero, they can and must work together with others.
And speaking of glorifying individualism, Campbell’s schematic of the Hero’s quest acknowledges that the hero will meet “allies and helpers” along the way, but it trivializes them as mere bus-stops on the route, temporary crutches and consultants to the Hero star of the show, not full-partners and co-heroes. This invites storytellers to accept John Updike’s vision of novels as “individual moral adventures,” instead of tag-team relays like my Pyn-Poi and Lakka in The Night Field or human mosaics, like Richard Powers’ The Overstory, or braided lives, like Naomi Alderman’s The Power, or brawling confederations of the mighty, like Marvel’s The Avengers.
So, one of my beefs with our Standard Issue Hero’s Journey is its vision of individual triumph that paints over the fact that in real life, myth, and fiction, Hero-work is often—maybe usually—collaborative. Real Heroes run in packs, y’all.
But wait, there’s more…
Another little detail that Campbell’s roadmap ignores is that, when someone takes off on a Hero’s Journey, somebody also stays home.
This idea first came to me through Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel Cold Mountain, which gorgeously twined together two stories, the Hero’s Journey that leads off to war and the Hero’s Staying that sits tight, defends the land, and keeps the home-fires burning. But the idea is much older than Cold Mountain. Think of Odysseus going off to fight the Trojans—leaving behind his wife Penelope to fend off the grabby thugs who want to takeover in his absence. To this day, textile artists speak of “Penelope weaving” when they have to go back and undo some of their work, in honor of Penelope’s sneaky agreement to marry one of the suitor-thugs just as soon as she finishes weaving a shroud for Odysseus’ father—which she secretly unravels every night while the suitors lie around in a drunken stupor.
Odysseus goes to war. Penelope stays home. They both have to fight, each in their own way. Two strands of one story. Two lanes on the Hero Highway.
It was the great Midwestern fantasy writer Kij Johnson who first told me that The Night Field was too big a story to be carried by just one Hero. This set me thinking about my co-heroes: not just Pyn-Poi’s friend Lakka, who joins her Quest along the way, but also about Pyn-Poi’s mother Marak, who stays behind with her people.
Nudged by Kij, I wrote Marak’s Hero’s Staying but wound up cutting it as the book veered further and further away from the classic Hero’s Journey and Updyke’s ideal of the “individual moral adventure.” But, towards the end of the editing process, my brilliant editor Jo Fletcher (the same Jo Fletcher who edited Ursula K. LeGuin for 17 years!) sensed that something was missing from the story. “Something about Pyn-Poi’s people at home; how they are doing?” she probed.
And that was enough of a hint. I dug out those lost pages and boiled them down into a series of dreams that my hero Pyn-Poi has towards the end of the novel, dreams that turned up the emotional heat so much I could barely stand it myself.
In life, myth, and fiction, the one who stays home has often been some form of mother or wife. But if you go back about 4000 years, to one of humanity’s oldest written Hero’s Journeys, you find Sumer’s Descent of Inanna.
In her later years, Inanna “opens her ear to the Great Below.” She hears the Call to venture into the Underworld to visit the bedside of her sister the Queen of the Dead who is laboring in childbirth. Inanna launches on her Hero’s Journey to the Underworld but, before she goes—she may be a god, but she’s not stupid—she leaves her loyal Ninshubur some “in case of emergency” instructions if she can’t make it home under her own power. Then, when the Queen of the Dead does, in fact, turn Inanna into a corpse, “a piece of rotting meat” hanging from a hook on the wall, Ninshubur follows the emergency protocol and is able to get Inanna back from the Great Below. The home-stayer is a critical part of the hero’s story.
In the creative world, if you love a form, you mess with it. You love sonnets, you play around with the rhyme scheme and stretch and shrink the line-lengths like rubber bands. You love classic comics, you break the panels, let the story spill all over the page, and pour in themes never seen before. You love a certain trope—vampires, superheroes, portals—you tweak it, run it backwards, spin it around till it’s dizzy and then stand it on its head. You love a theory, you keep poking at it, testing it, finding its weak points, the places where it just plain doesn’t work.
Let’s remember that Campbell’s formulation of the Hero’s Journey is a theory. It’s not reality; it’s a neat and clear conceptual map we’ve laid on top of a messy reality—a squishy amorphous mass of myths, dreams, and stories—in order to help us make sense of them, to help us make predictions, to help us do things and understand things. The key word here is “help.” If a theory stops helping us, because it limits our vision, well, then we need to work on the theory.
Joseph Campbell sketched out the Hero’s Journey at a time when Men Were Men and anyone who wasn’t a White cis-gendered male was shit out of luck. The Hero’s Journey might, like an elderly uncle, be showing some of the limitations of its generation.
I think that the template of the Hero going out to get the good stuff and bring it back to the people is printed so deep into our imagination because it goes all the way back to the dawn-times of human history, when the very first Hunters and the very first Gatherers really did have to go out, away from the safety of the fire-circle, to bring back good stuff to the people: food for survival, the ultimate boon. But that very same imprinting drives Elon Musk’s impulse to colonize Mars instead of investing in the healing of the Earth. It powered the first stages of colonialism, too, when the guys with guns, germs, and steel set off from the safety of their ordinary lives and ventured to the strange lands, facing dangers and ordeals to bring back to their people the good stuff: the spices, gold, silver, diamonds, and human beings they snatched from other lands. Theft. The Hero’s Journey doesn’t always roll in the direction of justice.
We creative types love the Hero’s Journey. So it’s our job to test it, tweak it, stretch it. It was handed to us as a spiritual travelogue for one man’s individualistic adventure; it’s time to re-draw that 70-year-old circle so that it truly honors the collaboration, synergy, and multi-generation efforts of co-heroes.
You love something, you don’t let it get all rusted up and frozen in time. You just don’t. You mess with it.
Remember the ending of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the classic teen/horror/comedy/spiritual allegory? In the last episode of the series, the heroes change the rules so that it’s no longer just a single Chosen One in every generation who has “the strength and skill to fight the vampires”—that won’t do it anymore. They break the Hero’s Journey open and spill it all over the planet with a new magic that means everyone in the world who might be a Slayer, will be a Slayer. Now that, brothers and sisters, is messing with a beloved form.
The climate crisis is here, y’all, and it means business. The crisis of democracy … Of world hunger…. Of nuclear war… So many crises. So little time. To meet this moment—and the Four Horsemen of Homeostasis that our poor battered Earth is deploying to reduce the population of her most troublesome species—we are going to need not just a Chosen One or two. Everyone—and every part of everyone, because the Hero’s Journey also refers to our inner quest for wholeness—is going to have to hero up to face the coming storms.
Full participation, y’all—that’s what it’s going to take.
To face our moment of global crisis, all creatives need to become aware of the Hero’s Journey’s limitations, toxicities, and roots in patriarchy, colonialism, and individualism in order to open the door to new dreams and possibilities for tomorrow’s heroes—because we cannot get what we cannot imagine.
As we story-makers offer our people powerful images of collective heroism—duos and teams and leagues and legions of superheroes—we need to stretch that good ole circle even further, to the point where it frames entire nations—the whole human race—as being on a shared Hero’s Journey together, with each of us carrying our own tiny piece of the story.
You can’t get what you can’t imagine.
So, my heroes, my dreamers, my imaginers—let’s imagine that.
Pushcart Prize-nominee Donna Glee Williams graduated from Tulane University and Charity Hospital School of Nursing, then earned an MFA and PhD from LSU. The imagined pre-industrial societies of her novels The Braided Path, Dreamers, and The Night Field owe a lot to her years of wayfaring on four continents. Her ecofable The Night Field (kindled by her Fulbright Senior Environmental Leadership Fellowship researching the human cost of pesticides) received the 2024 Manly Wade Wellman Award, and inspired a suite of music, “Songs for The Night Field,” by Lynn Morgan Rosser. https://lynnmorganrosser.com/music Her short fiction has received nomination for the Pushcart Prize, finalist status multiple times in Writers of the Future, Honorable Mention in Gardner Dozois’s Best of the Year anthology, and performance onstage in Hollywood as a finalist in SCI Fest LA. These days she mostly walks in the woods, writes, and leads dream-groups in her little cabin. https://www.donnagleewilliams.com/