How to Outline Your Novel with the Hero’s Journey

You have a story idea you love, and somewhere along the way you've heard that the Hero's Journey is the way to structure it. Twelve stages, a hero who leaves home, faces trials, and comes back changed. It sounds clean. It sounds doable. Best of all, it makes writing a whole novel feel less like an impossible dream and more like a series of steps you can actually follow, from the idea in your head to a finished book.

But knowing the twelve stages and actually using them to outline your novel are two very different things. You can recite all twelve and still sit down to a blank page with no idea what actually belongs in each one. How do they map onto a story that runs 80,000 words? Where does each one go? And how do you take that circle-shaped diagram everyone shares and turn it into your book?

In this post, I'll walk you through how to divide your word count into acts, place each of the twelve stages, and—the part most guides skip—understand what this framework can and can't do on its own, so you know what your story still needs underneath it to hold together.

Let's start with what the Hero's Journey actually is.

What Is the Hero's Journey?

The Hero's Journey is a story structure that maps both a character's external adventure and their internal transformation. It unfolds across twelve stages, grouped into three acts—Act 1 (Departure), Act 2 (Descent and Initiation), and Act 3 (Return). To outline your novel with it, you divide your target word count into those three acts, place the twelve stages across them, and use each stage to track not just what happens to your hero, but how they change because of it.

For this post, I'm using Christopher Vogler's twelve-stage version of the Hero's Journey. Vogler adapted Joseph Campbell's monomyth—the single underlying pattern Campbell believed sits beneath myths from cultures all over the world—into something more practical for writers. That's the framework. But the twelve stages rest on something deeper—worth understanding before you start placing them.

Your Hero Travels Two Journeys at Once

The Hero's Journey tracks two things at once: what your hero does and who they become.

The outer journey is the external plot—everything your character does to chase their goal. It's about what they want, the tangible thing just out of reach, and all the obstacles standing between them and it.

The inner journey is the emotional one—everything your character has to become to get what they truly need. They grow because of the obstacles on the outer journey. The external trials force the internal change.

For your story to work, these two journeys have to stay connected—the outer events driving the inner change. When they're not, you can hit all twelve stages and still end up with an outline that feels flat: a list of things that happen instead of a story.

Now, with this in mind, let me walk you through how to outline your novel with the Hero's Journey. We'll do it in three steps: divide your word count into acts, break those acts into scenes, then map the twelve stages on top. For these examples, I'll use a target of 80,000 words—use whatever target word count you're comfortable with as you follow along.

Step 1: Divide Your Target Word Count Into Acts

Start by breaking your total word count into the three acts. This is what turns that circular diagram into a linear, novel-shaped container you can work inside—before you place a single stage.

Here's the standard breakdown:

• Act 1, Departure is about 25% of your total word count
• Act 2, Descent and Initiation is about 50% of your total word count
• Act 3, Return is about 25% of your total word count

So an 80,000-word novel divides like this:

• Act 1, Departure: 80,000 × .25 = about 20,000 words
• Act 2, Descent and Initiation: 80,000 × .50 = about 40,000 words
• Act 3, Return: 80,000 × .25 = about 20,000 words

Step 2: Break Each Act Into Scenes

Now divide each act into scenes. A good working target is 2,000 words per scene—long enough to convey what's happening, short enough to keep a reader turning pages. That's not a hard-and-fast rule—scenes can run shorter or longer—but most writers find it easier to work toward a guideline than a blank page.

Dividing each act by 2,000 gives you:

• Act 1, Departure: 20,000 / 2,000 = about 10 scenes
• Act 2, Descent and Initiation: 40,000 / 2,000 = about 20 scenes
• Act 3, Return: 20,000 / 2,000 = about 10 scenes

That's a target of about 40 scenes total—round numbers to plan against.

Step 3: Map the 12 Stages of the Hero's Journey

Now you can map your story using the twelve stages. One thing to keep in mind first: these aren't twelve scenes. They're story movements—some unfold in a single scene, others stretch across several. Here's what each one is doing, act by act; as you read, jot down any ideas for your own story.

Act 1: Departure

The hero is called away from their ordinary world and eventually commits to the adventure. This is your first ~25%, about 10 scenes.

1. The Ordinary World. We meet the hero in their everyday life, before the adventure begins. Introduce them sympathetically here, so readers connect with who they are, and let us glimpse what's missing or unresolved in their world—the problem they're not yet fully aware of.
2. The Call to Adventure (12%). This is your inciting incident: something happens that upsets the balance of the hero's life and pushes them toward what's ahead. It presents a problem, a challenge, or an opportunity they can't ignore—sharpening their awareness that something has to change—and sets the rest of the story in motion.
3. The Refusal of the Call. The hero hesitates, or refuses the call outright. Stepping into the unknown is frightening, and the life they'd be leaving behind feels safe and familiar—so for now, their reluctance to change wins out over the pull of the adventure.
4. Meeting with the Mentor. The hero meets a mentor figure—often a person, but it can just as easily be a hard-won lesson, a tool, or a piece of information—that gives them what they need to overcome that reluctance and move forward: training, knowledge, advice, or simply the courage to face their fear.
5. Crossing the First Threshold (25%). This is your first plot point, where the story crosses from Act 1 into Act 2. The hero fully commits to change and steps out of their ordinary world into the new, unfamiliar one where the adventure unfolds. From here on, there's no turning back.

Act 2: Descent and Initiation

The hero enters an unfamiliar world, makes allies and enemies, survives the story's central crisis, and reaches the turning point that sends them home. This is the middle ~50%, about 20 scenes.

6. Tests, Allies, and Enemies. Now in this new world, the hero makes friends and enemies, learns how it works, and starts experimenting with who they're becoming. This stretch is where a lot of middles sag, so keep the challenges escalating—each test costing more than the last—until the hero is pushed from reacting to events into actively driving them.
7. Approach to the Inmost Cave. The hero closes in on the most dangerous part of this new world, where their biggest challenge waits. This stage is the buildup before that confrontation—planning, regrouping, and steadying themselves for the big change ahead.
8. The Ordeal (50%). This is your midpoint: the central crisis of the journey and the hero's toughest test so far. They confront a major fear, enemy, temptation, or truth—attempting the big change the whole story has been building toward—and the experience transforms them. In mythic terms, it's a death-and-rebirth moment: some old version of the hero falls away, and a stronger, more conscious one begins to emerge.
9. The Reward. Having survived the Ordeal, the hero claims a reward—an object, a secret, hard-won knowledge, or reconciliation with someone they care about. This is where the fallout from the attempt lands—improvements and setbacks both—and whatever they've gained gives them what they'll need to survive what's still ahead.
10. The Road Back (75%). This stage bridges Act 2 into Act 3, and it's often where your all-is-lost low point falls. With the reward in hand, the hero rededicates themselves to finishing what they started and turns back toward home, but the story isn't over: the consequences of the Ordeal come raging after them, often in a chase, and the final confrontation begins to take shape.

Act 3: Return

The hero faces a final test and returns home transformed. This is your final ~25%, about 10 scenes.

11. The Resurrection (88%-90%). This is your climax: the hero's final test, with higher stakes than anything that came before. It's their last attempt at the change they've been resisting all along—where we find out whether they've truly learned the lessons of the journey and become the person the story needed them to become.
12. Return with the Elixir. The hero comes home changed, having finally mastered the problem they couldn't even see at the start, and brings something back with them. In a modern novel that "elixir" might be hard-won wisdom, repaired trust, justice, peace, or simply a solution to the problem they left behind—something that benefits everyone around them.

The Hero's Journey Is a Lens, Not a Blueprint

Now that you've seen the whole structure—and how neatly it lines up with both your plot's turning points and your hero's inner arc—here's the part most guides skip: it's still just a skeleton.

That's not a knock on it. As Vogler himself puts it, the Hero's Journey is "a skeletal framework that should be fleshed out with the details and surprises of the individual story." It's brilliant for seeing the shape of a transformation. What it can't do is develop the specific story you'll tell with it. Two things, in particular, are still on you.

First, you still need to account for genre. Every genre comes with its own conventions—the specific elements and emotional experience a romance, a thriller, or a mystery promises its readers. The Hero's Journey gives you a broad shape, but not necessarily the scenes your genre's readers are actually waiting for.

And second, you still need to develop the story itself. This is the big one. The stages can tell you that an Ordeal belongs near the middle—but not what your Ordeal is, or why it matters. You have to develop your idea into a premise strong enough to carry a full-length novel, with a character, conflict, theme, and stakes that connect into a story that actually works. That's the work that has to come first, so the structure has something to hold up.

If you skip that work, you'll feel it the moment you sit down to outline with a structure like this. You'll have the map and nothing true to put on it. That's why a draft can lose steam in the middle even when all twelve stages are technically in place: the structure was never the problem. The real gap is the foundational work every story needs underneath whatever structure you build on.

Final Thoughts

The Hero's Journey can help you map a powerful transformation arc—a clear through-line for how your hero changes from beginning to end. Use it for that.

Just don't expect it to do the work it wasn't designed to do.

You'll still need to choose your genre and deliver on the promises readers are waiting for. You'll still need to develop your protagonist, antagonist, secondary characters, and settings. You'll still need to pin down your central conflict, theme, and stakes. And you'll still need to make sure all of those foundational elements are connected and working together to produce a story that works.

And if you want help building that foundation, that's exactly what we do inside Notes to Novel. Doors open twice a year—join the waitlist here and I'll make sure you're the first to know.