Epic Steps
One of my all time favorite concepts has an origin I can’t quite wrap my head around. It showed up on a website that was talking about television cliches and led me to a wikipedia article. These are not my typical rabbit trails. But the concept is philosophical gold.
The idea is that our favorite epics have a perfect pattern - one that you almost can’t avoid. Lord of the Rings, Spiderman, Mulan. Every plot depicts a core cycle, so the theory goes, and the cycle will repeat as long as tales are told. The cycle is character based, but it can repeat or replicate many times in a single work. Sometimes it is shared and other times it is shouldered by a single hero.
“The Hero’s Journey” is credited to Joseph Campbell and his writing explaining the “monomyth”. It was published in his book from 1949, at least 60 years before the concept fluttered onto my oversized college laptop. For an idealistic moment I tried to access and digest his original work, but practicality took over and I learned about the monomyth from this website
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHerosJourney
And this wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey
I took this hodgepodge of cliches and patterns, sloshed it together with a wild theory that we live the monomyth, and sprinkled in some philosophy of memoirist Donald Miller. I walked out with a palatable but mysterious new perspective:
My day to day decisions are contributing to a story and I am walking around in a real life epic. My last failed romance walked the monomyth circle and my next great adventure will follow the same loop. A quick wit and an attractive figure invited me into an attempt to find love. A kind motherly figure in my community showed me the path to lasting romance and her pet dogs joined my journey to keep me company. A call and a mentor, companions that soothe the pains of drama. Do you see it all in the graphic? I leapt to the death and rebirth experience when I realized the combination of our two beautiful personalities created something toxic. I panicked, tried to keep afloat, and eventually ended the romance that had been blooming in the field and re-entered my singleness with a new understanding of myself and young adulthood.
I think we are living the monomyth every day. Life is an epic and remembering this makes me want to spend mine magnificently. I know I am not a superhero, a savior in a dystopian world, or a long awaited prince. Even so, I think I see clues of my future in the phases of the monomyth cycle. And I love making choices that affect the way my character will experience the phases of my story.
