This post is part of a
series of posts sponsored by SCBWI Florida Tampa Bay area writers.
We invite you to join us in this online book study of THE
WRITER’S JOURNEY: MYTHIC STRUCTURE FOR WRITERS, Third Edition by Christopher
Vogler.
Post #8
Book 2, pages 187-229
Contributor: Jane Jeffries
The Final Act
Today’s
blog post focuses on the final three stages of the Hero’s Journey: The Road
Back, Resurrection, and Return with the Elixir. These stages make up Act III.
THE ROAD BACK
After
the lessons and ewards of the great Ordeal have been appreciated and
assimilated, heroes must choose whether to stay in the Special World or head
home to the Ordinary World. Most decide to take “The Road Back,” either
returning to the starting point of the story or continuing on to a new
destination. Here, the energy of the story surges once again. “This stage
represents the resolve of the hero to return to the Ordinary World and
implement the lessons learned in the Special World,” notes Vogler. The Road
Back marks the passage from Act Two to Act Three, the point in the story where
the hero recommits to the adventure, being pried from her comfort zone by
either an outside force or something from within.
Fear
of retaliation or pursuit is what typically motivates the hero to leave the
Special World. If the hero has not completely defeated the opponent, the
villain may rise up even stronger than before. The spouse or a friend of a
defeated opponent may swear vengeance against the hero. Psychological
opponents, such as flaws, habits, desires or addictions, can rear their ugly
heads after the hero believed she had overcome her demons.
“In
many cases, heroes leave the Special World only because they are running for
their lives,” writes Vogler. While chases can appear anywhere in a story, the
end of Act Two is where they most often occur. Chases have a way of revving up
a story’s energy. Heroes are most commonly chased by villains, but they can be
chased by admirers (who are told not to follow). Or heroes themselves can do
the chasing, when a villain escapes and wreaks havoc again.
The
Road Back provides a time to “acknowledge the hero’s resolve to finish” the
journey, writes Vogler. It provides her with the “necessary motivation to
return home with the elixir despite the temptations of the Special World and
the trials that remain ahead.”
Resurrection
After
“The Road Back” comes the “Resurrection,” the final exam of the journey. The
central crisis or Supreme Ordeal is the midterm exam, Vogler explains. But every
great story has a final exam. The hero must prove through Resurrection that she
has not only retained what she learned in the Special World but can apply it at
home in the Ordinary World.
Heroes
have to go through a “final purging and purification before reentering the
Ordinary World,” asserts Vogler. This comes in the form of the climax, the
hero’s final and most perilous encounter with death. After the climax, the hero
must change. This is where writers must find a way to demonstrate the change in
their hero through behavior or appearance or both.
Resurrection
can take the form of a final, decisive battle with the opponent. In Westerns,
crime fiction, and action films, the Resurrection is the showdown or shootout. Typically,
the villain is the one who dies. But even if the hero dies, she lives on in the
memory of the survivors—and readers—who remember the lessons learned by the
tragic hero, keeping her memory alive.
Resurrection
can also take the form of a climactic decision that shows whether or not the
hero has learned the lessons of change. She must show whether she’ll fall back
on her old ways of reacting, or use what she’s learned to decide in a new and different
way.
As
the Resurrection typically marks the climax of the story, it also marks the
point of greatest energy, the last big moment. Climaxes are usually explosive,
loud, dramatic; however, “quiet climaxes” do exist. Vogler defines a quiet
climax as the point in the story when “the knots of tension created in the body
of the story come untied, perhaps after a gentle tug from a final realization.”
Stories
can have a series of climaxes, or “rolling climaxes,” as individual subplots
are resolved. Heroes can experience climaxes on different levels of awareness,
through mind, body, and emotion. Regardless of form, however, the climax should
provide a cathartic moment—“a purifying emotional release, or an emotional
breakthrough.”
“A
catharsis is the logical climax of a hero’s character arc,” writes Vogler. The
character arc is the gradual stages of change a character experiences—with “gradual”
being the operative word. Vogler believes the stages of the Hero’s Journey provide
a good guide to use when creating the gradual steps needed to create a
realistic character arc, as illustrated in the following table:
Character Arc In Relation To Hero’s Journey
|
Character Arc
|
Hero’s Journey
|
|
ACT I
|
|
Limited
Awareness of a Problem
|
Ordinary
World
|
|
Increased
Awareness
|
Call
to Adventure
|
|
Reluctance
to Change
|
Refusal
|
|
Overcoming
Reluctance
|
Meeting
with the Mentor
|
|
ACT II
|
|
Committing
to Change
|
Crossing
the Threshold
|
|
Experimenting
with First Change
|
Test,
Allies, Enemies
|
|
Preparing
for Big Change
|
Approach
to Inmost Cave
|
|
Attempting
Big Change
|
Ordeal
|
|
Consequences
of the Attempt
(Improvements
and Setbacks)
|
Reward
(Seizing
the Sword)
|
|
ACT III
|
|
Rededication
to Change
|
The
Road Back
|
|
Final
Attempt at Big Change
|
Resurrection
|
|
Final
Mastery of the Problem
|
Return
with the Elixir
|
The
Resurrection marks the hero’s last attempt to dramatically change her attitude
or behavior. A hero can backslide at this point, as Han Solo did in Star Wars when he turned his back on the
final attempt to crack the Death Star. But as all good heroes do, he decided at
the last minute to take part, revealing that he had changed and was willing to
risk his life for the cause.
In
the Resurrection, the hero must prove that she has completely changed; the old
Self is dead. Writers must show this change in appearance and action. “It’s not
enough to have people around a hero notice that she’s changed,” cautions
Vogler. “It’s not enough to have her talk about change. The audience must be
able to see it in her dress, behavior, attitude, and actions.”
Once
the hero passes the final exam, the Resurrection, she can move on to the final
stage: Returning with the Elixir.
Return With The
Elixir
“Returning
with the Elixir means implementing change in your daily life and using the
lessons of adventure to heal your wounds,” writes Vogler. True heroes “Return
with the Elixir” from the Special World to share the spoils with others. The
Return is also known as the “denouement,” the tying up of loose ends. There are
two ways to untie the plot lines that created conflict and tension:
· Open-ended
approach, in which conflicts are unresolved, questions are left unanswered, and
the circle is left open. This story form is more popular in Asia and in
Australian and European movies.
· Circular or
closed form, in which the story comes full circle; there’s a sense of closure
and completion. In this most popular story structure, the hero literally
returns to the starting point of the story to show how far he’s come. In the
movie Ghost, for example, the hero
can’t say “I love you” at the beginning of the story. But at the end, after
dying and passing all tests in the after-life, he is able to Return to the
Ordinary World and say, “I love you” to his wife.
A
good Return has an element of surprise. It may have a twist or provide an
unexpected revelation. It should also dole out rewards and punishments. But
above all, it should provide an Elixir, whether literal or metaphoric. The
Elixir proves that the hero survived the Special World and serves as an example
for others. The Elixir can be tangible, such as buried treasure or medicine
brought back to save lives, or intangible, such as love, change, responsibility
or even tragedy, from which the audience learns from the hero’s defeat what
mistakes to avoid so they don’t suffer the same fate.
An
epilogue or postscript, on rare occasions, can also complete the story, by
moving into the future to show how the characters turned out.
Vogler
warns writers to beware of the pitfalls of the Return: unresolved subplots, too
many endings, abrupt endings, and loss of focus. “The story should end with the
emotional equivalent of a punctuation mark,” Vogler says. “A story, like a
sentence, can end in only four ways: with a period, an exclamation point, a
question mark, or an ellipsis.” An open-ended story may end with a question
mark (“Will the hero Return with the Elixir or will it be forgotten?”) or an
ellipsis (“She proved she’s not a killer, but…”). A circular story may end with
a period (“There’s no place like home.”) or exclamation point (“Repent or perish!”).
Regardless
of how the story ends—with a question mark, exclamation point, ellipsis, or period—Vogler’s
work informs us that “a good story, like a good journey, leaves us with an
Elixir that changes us, makes us more aware, more alive, more human, more
whole, more a part of everything that is.”
Meet Today’s Contributor—Jane Jeffries
Jane
Jeffries is an instructional designer at St. Petersburg College. She earned her
Master of Arts in Writing degree from Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY.
She’s been published in Our Little
Friend, New Dimensions, Kids’ News/Parents’ News, and The Tampa Bay Times Sunday
Journal.
