I thoroughly enjoyed rereading Emily Wilson’s landmark translation of The Odyssey during a recent holiday in Croatia. It felt appropriate as were just up the coast from Odysseus’s home island of Ithaca. It got me thinking about the story templates Christopher Booker identifies in Seven Basic Plots, his influential 2004 work on storytelling.

Which Template Does The Odyssey Fit?

With its numerous storylines and shifts in tone and perspective, The Odyssey encompasses all of Booker’s basic plots. But taken as a whole, the poem is the original example of what Booker calls a ‘Voyage and Return’ tale. Stories that follow this template (see also Gladiator, Alice in Wonderland, The Lion King and many others), feature a hero who is striving to get home. Their journey may be literal or metaphorical. Their overwhelming desire is for a return to normality.

Odysseus, faced with the prospect of living forever on a lush island with the divinely beautiful goddess Calypso, is miserable. All he can think of is being back on rocky Ithaca with his wife Penelope. He’ll get there, whatever it takes. He is exhausted by adventure. He just wants everything to get back to the way it was.

Of course things will never be exactly as they were. Time passes. The journey home is full of peril. When the hero finally arrives, things have changed. The hero has changed. But in finding home, the hero also finally finds himself or herself.

“Voyage and Return” in A Work Context

At MSB Executive we help our clients find ways of applying the Seven Basic Plots in work contexts. There are many ways in which you could use a Voyage and Return template to talk about a business scenario. It might help a risk-tolerant client to feel good about a stabilisation in the market after a period of volatility. It can provide a positive way of framing a return to core services or products after a period of diversification that didn’t work out. Or perhaps you have ‘come home’ to a former employer after an unsuccessful stint elsewhere.

What We Can Do For You

Using storytelling techniques to level up your communications is a favourite topic of ours at MSB Executive. We are proud to have a professional storyteller (the fantastic Wendy Shearer) on our team. Please get in touch if you’d like to learn more about applying Voyage and Return, Rags to Riches, Overcoming the Monster or any other classic plots when you talk about your business.