Nearly every blockbuster movie of the past 40 years (and possibly before that) has been deliberately structured around something called the “monomyth,” also known as the Hero’s Journey. Star Wars. The Matrix. The Lion King. So were Dan Millman’s book The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist and the entire Harry Potter series.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell spent his life analyzing myths across times and cultures, and he discovered that every single myth—going back to Homer’s Odyssey and earlier—followed this structure.

This isn’t a surprise, or at least, it wasn’t to Campbell. The monomyth is the structure of the universal human journey—at least, for those of us who explore beyond the status quo, or what Campbell called the Ordinary World.

If you’ve heard of the Hero’s Journey, you may think of it as being filled with dragons and caves, Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi, but the point of the Hero’s Journey—the point of every single myth that has ever existed—as Campbell told Bill Moyers in 1988, is transformation of consciousness. It’s an internal journey, externalized by various cultures (including Hollywood) to give resonance to the experience every human undergoes.

Campbell’s landmark book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, referenced our oneness (the singular Hero is consciousness) as well as our human expressions (the “thousand faces” are the seven billion human expressions of consciousness). But we’re dealing with language, and things can get messy, so “the hero’s journey” also applies to the individual.

Some heroes—the kind that most blockbusters feature—go on swashbuckling adventures (think Indiana Jones). And then, in Campbell’s words:

“The other kind is the spiritual hero, who has learned or found a mode of experiencing the supernormal range of human spiritual life, and then come back and communicated it.”

That “supernormal range of human spiritual life” is consciousness.

Your readers are the original heroes that Campbell was writing about (as are you, as am I, as are we all). 

That’s why books and movies that follow this structure are so deeply resonant (or in Hollywood terms, blockbusters). The structure isn’t just for fiction and screenwriters, though. As a nonfiction writer, you can use the Hero’s Journey to create greater resonance with your readers.

Before you can use the structure, though, you need to know what it is. There are actually two parallel Hero’s Journeys, inner and outer…

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Note: I am in the process of creating a Hero’s Journey workbook (200+ pages!) with inner and outer prompts for each stage, as well as a process to turn your notes into a compelling memoir structure. To make sure you’re notified when this becomes available, please subscribe to Resonant Storytelling on Substack.