Hero's Journey

Outline your novel with the ultimate Hero’s Journey Template

The hero’s journey is one of storytelling’s most famous blueprints: a 12-stage circle that carries a protagonist out into the unknown, through their greatest trials, and home again — forever changed.

This template turns the hero’s journey into a dynamic board system, designed to teach you this age-old method as you work through each beat. Like every story structure template in Reedsy Studio, it’s built around the driving belief of its story framework — and the hero’s journey believes in transformation. Each card will include:

• The workshop — quick, guided questions and exercises that pressure-test each story beat. “What is currently ‘wrong’ with your protagonist’s Ordinary World?” “Write the worst-case scenario if your protagonist answers the Call — and if they don’t.”
• The checkpoint — 1-2 key questions to move your hero further from who they were — and closer to who they need to become.
• The scene — space to summarize your story beat, along with a worked example for reference — in this case, we follow Rocky Balboa through all twelve stages to help you understand the workings behind this story structure.

This story structure brought Rocky, Odysseus, and Bilbo home, and it can do the same for the hero you’re writing today.

Take your hero through all 12 stages

The hero’s journey unfolds across 12 stages in your Outline board:

• The Ordinary World. Here’s our hero! Just living their little life, doing their little job. Surely nothing will disturb this.
• Call to Adventure. What’s this? Something’s arrived? A letter? A prophecy? A problem that requires a journey to fix?
• Refusal of the Call. But the hero doesn’t want to go on the journey!
• Meeting the Mentor. Oh good, someone wise shows up, dispenses cryptic advice, and gives our hero just enough of a push.
• Crossing the First Threshold. Here we go — the hero passes the point of no return, leaving the familiar world behind.
• Tests, Allies, and Enemies. Great, they’re out in this strange new world now: facing trials, forging friendships, and creating rivalries that will shape everything ahead.
• Approach to the Inmost Cave. It’s getting dark in here. Whose idea was it to approach the thing the hero fears most again?
• The Ordeal. Cue the worst moment of our hero’s life, the one the whole journey has been leading to — and the old “them” doesn’t make it out.
• The Reward. But they do it. They seize the prize — an object, a truth, a reconciliation — though it comes at a great cost.
• The Road Back. Time to head home! Simple, right? Not so fast.
• The Resurrection. What’s left between them and home? Only the climax: one final test that completes the transformation.
• Return with the Elixir. Home at last: a little worse for wear, a lot changed, and carrying something the old them could never have imagined.

Every card is fully customizable: rename stages to match your story’s vocabulary, delete what your plot doesn’t need, add your own questions, and check off stages as you complete them.

Link your hero's journey to your characters and world

A journey is only as compelling as the hero who takes it and the world they cross — which is why this template is really three boards, not one. Your Outline holds the journey; your Characters and Places boards hold the people and world it moves through; and @-mentions on every stage card tie them together.

Give your hero’s rival, love interest, and their suspiciously well-informed librarian friend each a profile, then link them to the stages where they appear. Rethink your hero’s deepest fear on their character card — it’ll be conveniently waiting right beside the Ordeal you’ve planned around it. Every element of your story universe stays connected and consistent.

Best of all, when the last stage is checked off, your first chapter starts right here in Reedsy Studio — with your outline just one click away as you draft.

Your journey, saved and synced on every device

Reedsy Studio automatically saves every change you make, so your outline is always current, always backed up, and always where you left it. And because Studio works on any device, you can plot the Call to Adventure on your laptop and rethink the Road Back on your phone.

In a word, your hero travels with you.

From first outline to finished book, all in Reedsy Studio

This template draws on the structures writers have trusted for decades — Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and Christopher Vogler’s twelve-stage Writer’s Journey — refined by Reedsy into a framework built for novelists.

And it’s just the beginning of what Studio can do. The same app that holds your outline is where you can plan, write, and format the whole book.

The Hero’s Journey Template includes:

• 3 interactive Outline, Characters, and Places boards
• 22 cards, including Character, Supporting Character, and Location cards
• A worked example following Rocky (1976), and a status tracker for every stage

Beyond the template, Studio provides:

• A full library of planning templates — story structures, outlines, characters, and worldbuilding
• A distraction-free manuscript editor for drafting and revision
• Professional typesetting to export print-ready PDF and EPUB files
• Automatic saving, cross-device syncing, and collaboration tools

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