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CRITICAL COMMENTARY FORA WRITER’S
JOURNEY
The Hero’s Journey as a Metaphor for the
Creative Process
(25,600 words)
199
Table of Figures
Figure 1: A Writers Journey aligns three p. 202
paradigms: the mythic archetype, the creative
process, and spiritual growth.
Figure. 2: A mapping of the four stages of the p. 213
creative cycle (inner circle), onto the four stages of
psychotherapy (middle circle), and Joseph
Campbells monomyth The Heros Journey (outer
circle).
Figure 3: The Heros Journey. p. 216
Figure 4: Koestlers bisociation theory of creativity. p. 242
Figure 5: Koestlers trivial and tragic planes. p. 243
Figure 6: The protagonists need vs. desire. p. 245
200
INTRODUCTION: THE CREATIVE QUEST
A Writers Journey is a memoir that relates how, after being successfully published, I develop
a creative block during which I am no longer able to intuit a plot. I perceive this not as lack of
knowledge or technique, but as a failure of the imagination. I can no longer make the
imaginative leaps required to connect the dots and allow the storyline to unfold.
In researching the creative process in order to resolve this block, I discover that attitudes
endorsed by Eastern philosophy and mindfulness (such as beginners mind, mindful
awareness, non-attachment and loss of ego) are also attitudes conducive to the creative
process. I therefore embark on a quest to recover my creativity and complete my work-in-
progress by adopting an attitude of mindful awareness and recovering my own beginners
mind. Ultimately, I fail to complete my novel. However, accepting failure serves to
deconstruct the successful persona I had been clinging to, and facilitates the very attitudes I
had been trying to cultivate: non-attachment, loss of ego, and beginners mind. This allows
me to start again as a beginner. A Writers Journey therefore describes two simultaneous
journeys: a journey through a creative block, and a spiritual journey.1
In writing the memoir, however, a third paradigm emerged: as a quest narrative in which the
goal is creativity itself, A Writers Journey aligns the stages of the creative process with the
mythic archetype. So, the memoir aligns three paradigms: the mythic archetype, the creative
process, and spiritual growth.
1 In using the term spiritual I offer the definition provided by Sam Harris in Waking Up: Searching for
spirituality without religion, in which he says that spirituality can be taken to mean simply, Deepening that
understanding [of the way things are], and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self. See: Sam
Harris, Waking Up: Searching for spirituality without religion, (London: Black Swan, 2014), p. 9.
201
The mythic
archetype
The
Spiritual
creative
growth
process
Fig. 1: A Writers Journey aligns three paradigms: the mythic archetype, the creative process and spiritual
growth.
In the following chapters I make a close analysis of Joseph Campbells monomyth, The
Heros Journey, identifying parallels between each stage of this archetype and the stages of
the creative process. I conclude that the archetype could be read as a metaphor for the
creative process, and that the message implicit in all stories is live creatively. I suggest that
the central point at which all three paradigms overlap represents the deconstruction of the
self that occurs in the death of the egoic self during the Belly of the Whale motif, and during
the incubation stage of the creative process. This is also the state of mind achieved through
the practice of mindful awareness. I also identify the ways in which A Writers Journey
adheres to both paradigms, thereby supporting the mythic approach to creativity.
But first, in Chapter 1, I establish a critical context for A Writers Journey. I also reflect on
the process of writing the memoir and describe how, by storying my creative journey as
narrative nonfiction, the stages of the mythic archetype revealed themselves.
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