Hero with a Thousand Faces..

I can't remember who wrote the book, but Gil based the creative writing night stuff on Carl Jung's work on archetypes, and the book Hero with a Thousand Faces. Ah, here we go: written by James Campbell, a "seminal work in comparative mythology".

Above is a diagram showing a format for "the hero's journey" which Gil took us through. It's by a dude called Vogler who based his diagram/thinking on Campbell's one (shown below). I stole them both from here (the dude writing about them isn't so keen on the idea, but I like it..). Basically the deal Campbell's on about is that most stories that "work" (and the broad scheme of myths & mythologies) have a hero that is shoved out of his ordinary world and into an adventure! He is challenged and learns stuff and changes along the way.. and ends up back in the ordinary world but with the tools to redeem it.. I don't think it's necessarily the only way to have a good story, but it does seem to work, and crop up quite a bit! And it's cool.. I guess, in the simplest form it ties in with what we were all taught about stories and plot in school - setting, complication, resolution etc..

Anyway, whichever way you look at it, stories are cool, and myths are awesome. I wanna read more myths! Anyone got a favourit one??