A Heroic Journey Update for the 21st Century

The most expansive, science-based instruction on the heroic journey and how it applies to your writing.

Story Grid’s Update to the Heroic Journey

If you’re interested in storytelling at all, you know there’s an ancient roadmap underlying all stories, something like the source code in a piece of software. Across time and cultures, all humans understand this code, even if we can’t quite explain it.

This invisible map or code helps your characters navigate and find meaning in their world, and it connects you intimately with your readers, providing them with the emotional catharsis they’re looking for in a Story that Works.

The shorthand writers and editors use for this code is called The Heroic Journey. You’ve seen it on the screen in Star Wars and Black Panther and on stage in Hamilton. You’ve buried yourself in thousands of pages of it, from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to The Hobbit to the many adventures of Harry Potter.

The Heroic Journey has been powering our stories for millennia, but no one started to investigate how it worked until psychologist Carl Jung parsed the complexity of character archetypes in the 1930s and Joseph Campbell revealed how key features of the Journey crossed time and cultures in The Hero with a Thousand Faces in the 1940s.

What have we learned since then? How has the code for our stories’ software been upgraded in the past 70 years?

Glad you asked.

A Next Generation Heroic Journey For a New Generation of Storytellers

There’s no doubt that we are living through an extraordinary moment in the human journey. A moment when we need to understand heroism and anti-heroism as we never have before. As storytellers and as citizens of the world, we face environmental, economic, and social change at a breakneck pace. We need powerful new stories to survive our trials and continue our journey.

If we don’t understand the whole story, we’ll fall for only half of one.

Since the publication of The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know in 2015, Shawn Coyne has taken a fresh look at Jung and Campbell, the original hackers of the Hero’s Journey; immersed himself in cognitive science and philosophy; and explored multicultural approaches to Story. What has emerged is a new approach that fits the moment we’re experiencing now, blending insights from the arts and humanities with cutting edge revelations from the sciences.

The result is an updated Heroic Journey 2.0 for today’s writers, an upgraded method for navigating your way from the beginning to the end of your story, including a “Journey to the Bottom of Existence” that sheds light on the anti-heroic journey.

Inspired and Informed by Master Storytellers of the Past and Present

In developing the framework for this course, Coyne revisited and analyzed timeless masterworks to pinpoint the patterns and ideas they share. As participants, you’ll join Shawn in examining L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit as case studies that illustrate how to use Story Grid tools and methods and The Heroic Journey and The Anti-Heroic Journey to enrich your own work.

Together, you and Shawn will dig deep into Hamilton—a contemporary theatrical masterpiece andpitch-perfect example of The Heroic Journey that encompasses multiple storytelling genres.