The Hero Journey and the Seasons of the Sword
Adapted from an interview on The Inner Typewriter
One of the perks—and hazards—of having spent years as managing editor of the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell is that I can't watch a movie, read a novel, or ride a roller coaster without the hero journey whispering in my ear. Sometimes shouting.
So let me tell you what the hero journey is, why it matters to you as a reader, and how it wound its way through all four books of Seasons of the Sword—sometimes despite my best efforts to ignore it.
What Is the Hero Journey?
When Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949, he wasn't writing a how-to for screenwriters. He was looking at five thousand years of stories—from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Descent of Inanna in ancient Mesopotamia, through the Odyssey, the Arthurian romances, the life of the Buddha, the Gospels, all the way up to modern novels and films—and noticing something remarkable: they all shared a deep structural pattern.
Campbell borrowed a word from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake to describe that pattern: the monomyth. The single story. Not because there's only one tale to tell, but because at some fundamental level, it's always the same hero—and that hero is you.
That was Campbell's great insight, and it's the one that gets lost most often. The hero journey isn't primarily a plot template. It's a description of how we experience story. When you read a novel or watch a film and feel genuinely caught up in it—when your heart races, when you feel that something meaningful has happened—it's because the storyteller has tapped into these deep, archetypal currents. You project yourself onto the protagonist. You become Harry Potter under the cupboard stairs, or Dorothy staring at the sepia Kansas sky, or Luke Skywalker gazing at the twin suns. Their journey is your journey.
Campbell drew heavily on the psychology of Carl Jung, who argued that these patterns aren't learned—they're built into the architecture of the human mind—what Jung called archetypes. Every culture we've ever found has stories at its heart. We are, as the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga called us, Homo Ludens—the game-playing animal. Storytelling is one of our oldest and most essential games. It's how we teach, how we grieve, how we make sense of our lives.
Understanding what the human brain goes through during a transformative story is, I'd argue, an essential tool for any creative person.
So what does the pattern actually look like? Campbell described it as a circle—not a mountain. (That's the Aristotelian/Freytag model: inciting action, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. Useful, but different.) The hero journey is a round trip, and it has three great stages:
- Separation. The hero begins in the world of the everyday. Think Harry Potter in his cupboard, Dorothy on her aunt and uncle's farm in Kansas, Luke on Tatooine. Then comes what Campbell calls the call to adventure—an invitation or a disruption that pulls the hero toward something unknown. The hero may accept eagerly or may resist (Jonah tries very hard not to go to Nineveh; God sends a whale to change his mind). Either way, the hero crosses what Campbell calls the threshold of adventure: a clear boundary between the ordinary world and the world of the unknown. Dorothy steps through the farmhouse door from sepia Kansas into Technicolor Oz. Harry walks through the wall at King's Cross into Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. The world changes—visually, emotionally, fundamentally.
- Initiation. Once across the threshold, the hero enters the world of adventure, a place where none of the rules of the everyday world apply, and faces what Campbell calls the road of trials—a series of tests, quests, and encounters. He identified several archetypal episodes that recur across myths: the sacred marriage, atonement with the father (or mother), apotheosis, and the theft of the elixir. Not every story includes all of them, and they can appear in different combinations and sequences. But the essential movement is this: the hero undergoes experiences so profound that who they used to be dies. Sometimes the death is symbolic; sometimes, as in the Gospels or the life of the Buddha, it's literal. Either way, a new self is born from the ashes of the old.
- Return. The hero comes back. Whether to the same physical place or not, the story circles toward closure—because without that return, everything feels unfinished. The hero brings back what Campbell calls the elixir or the boon: it might be treasure, a magic weapon, hard-won wisdom, or a new vision of the universe. Whatever it is, the hero uses it to transform the world of the everyday. The circle closes. The ordinary world is remade.
Three stages: separation, initiation, return. And this pattern doesn't just shape plot—it shapes character (who the hero becomes through the journey) and setting (the contrast between the ordinary world and the world of adventure). All three dimensions work together to create an experience that, when it's done well, transforms not just the hero but the reader.
How the Hero Journey Found Seasons of the Sword
The Seasons of the Sword and the Hero Journey
Here's where it gets personal—and a little embarrassing.
I started writing Risuko well into my time at the Campbell Foundation. I got about forty thousand words in... and hit a wall. I had an outline, I thought I knew where the story was going, and I had absolutely no idea how to get from where I was to where I needed to be. So I put the manuscript away.
For the next two years, from 2006 to 2008, I worked full-time on bringing out the first new edition of The Hero with a Thousand Faces in forty years, published by New World Library. I was completely immersed in Campbell's ideas about story structure—and not thinking about my own story at all.
After the edition was published, some friends of my wife's who had read the early draft came back and asked, "So how does it end?" I told them I didn't know. They told me to finish it. So I pulled the manuscript out for the first time in five or six years and—thanks to all that time marinating in Campbell—realized two things.
- First, what I had wasn't one book. It was the outline for a four-book series. The reason I'd written all those words and felt like I was only a quarter of the way through was that I literally had three more books to write.
- Second, once I separated the material into volumes and sat down to draft and revise, I did my very best to throw Joseph Campbell out the window.
I didn't want to write a textbook illustration of Campbell's theory. I've read those and watched those, and had no interest in going there.
When I saw The Matrix, I enjoyed it—it's a fun, mind-bending film—but I could hear the pages of The Hero with a Thousand Faces turning loudly in the theater. Every beat is straight from the book. The original Star Wars trilogy is similar; George Lucas famously wrote what's now called A New Hope with a copy of Campbell's book open next to his typewriter. I admire what both film franchises achieved, but I wanted something that breathed on its own.
So I tried not to think about it. I trusted that after years of living inside these ideas, they were in me—part of my storytelling instincts. I focused on Risuko as a character: a young woman who loves to climb, who has lost her father and is losing everything she knows, who is stubborn and curious and more capable than she realizes.
And when I finished the first draft of Risuko and stepped back to look at what I'd written?
And between those two trees, she goes through a complete hero journey.
Each of the four Seasons of the Sword novels follows its own hero journey cycle—its own separation, initiation, and return. Risuko's ordinary world shifts from book to book as she grows, and each volume presents a new threshold, new trials, and a new transformation.
In Risuko, the separation is absolute and literal: Kano Murasaki is taken from her home, from the last remnants of her family's old life, and brought to the distant mountain compound of the enigmatic Lady Chiyome. The Full Moon is the world of adventure—beautiful, bewildering, and full of hidden dangers. Everything she thought she knew about herself is tested. By the end, she has gained skills and knowledge she didn't know she needed, and she returns to herself—but as someone profoundly changed. The girl who descends from the tree at the end of the book is not the girl who climbed one at the beginning.
In Bright Eyes, the world of the everyday has become the Full Moon itself—a sign of how far Risuko has already come. But a new adventure calls her out of that hard-won stability and into a wider, more dangerous world. The Full Moon itself is under threat. The trials she faces test not just her physical skills but her loyalties, her ability to read the intentions of the people around her, and her growing understanding of the brutal political landscape of Sengoku Japan. She returns carrying burdens she didn't expect.
Kano pushes her further still. The name itself signals transformation—she begins to claim her true identity, not just the nicknames others gave her. The world of adventure expands, the stakes sharpen, and the trials cut closer to the bone. She faces questions about duty, honor, and the cost of the path she's walking. The hero who returns from this book is someone who can no longer pretend that the choices ahead of her are simple.
And in Murasaki, the circle of the full series comes to a close. The final book is the return—not just for this volume's journey, but for the entire four-book arc. Risuko must take everything she has learned and bring it to bear on the greatest challenges she's yet faced. The elixir she carries is not a weapon or a treasure but a hard-won understanding of who she is—and who she chooses to be.
Because here's the thing: the four books together also form a single hero journey. Risuko is the great separation—a girl torn from everything familiar. Bright Eyes and Kano are the road of trials, the long initiation where she is tested, transformed, broken down, and rebuilt. And Murasaki is the return, where she brings what she's gained back to the world that needs it.
The series is built on circles within circles—each book a complete arc, and all four together forming a larger ring. That wasn't my conscious plan, not at first. But the pattern was there from the beginning, doing what Campbell always said it does: working below the surface, shaping the story from within.
Campbell would have said that's exactly the point. The hero journey isn't a formula you impose from the outside. It's the shape that stories naturally want to take, because it's the shape of human transformation itself. We don't change because we decide to one morning. We change because we're pulled out of what we know, tested by what we don't, and—if we're brave enough or stubborn enough—we find our way back, carrying something that makes the world a little different.
That's what I wanted for Risuko. That's what I hope happens for you when you read her story.
David Kudler is the author of the Seasons of the Sword series—Risuko, Bright Eyes, Kano, and Murasaki—and the publisher at Stillpoint Digital Press. He served for many years as managing editor of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, where he oversaw the landmark third edition of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
