Vogler’s writer’s journey

Vogler’s book is a craft manual, and the count of eight is for its character archetypes as they stand from the third edition (2007): the second edition (1998) lists seven and says it will not treat the Ally as a separate archetype, and the Ally joins in 2007; its better-known twelve are stages of plot, not archetypes. It grew from a seven-page studio memo, “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, and it rearranges Campbell’s seventeen stages into twelve that a screenwriter can use: the Ordinary World, the Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Meeting with the Mentor, Crossing the First Threshold, Tests, Allies and Enemies, Approach to the Innermost Cave, the Ordeal, Reward, the Road Back, the Resurrection, and Return with the Elixir. The eight archetypes are best read as functions a character performs in a story rather than types of person; the Mentor and the Threshold Guardian are roles, and a single character may move between them. Three editions (1992, 1998 and 2007) and a 2020 anniversary edition have made this the version through which many readers first meet Campbell, and Jung’s shadow and trickster at one further remove. The provenance point is that the twelve stages are Vogler’s of 1992, not Campbell’s seventeen and not Jung’s, and that the eight are a storyteller’s cast list. No study has tested either list.

Sources

• Vogler, C. (1992). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters. Michael Wiese Productions. Third edition (2007), The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, ISBN 978-1-932907-36-0.
• Wikipedia (secondary: the stages, the archetypes, the editions and the studio memo). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Writer%27s_Journey:_Mythic_Structure_for_Writers
• Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press edition, 1968. ISBN 978-0-691-01784-6. The source sequence.