One Writer's Journey
© Roxianne Moore
If you buy only one book on writing in 1998, make it The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters by Christopher Vogler. While it's not inexpensive ($22.95 for a trade paperback), it's worth the price. It has been featured on line in such diverse places as Maine Photographic Workshop's "Filmmaker's Recommended Reading List and Debbie Macomber's Deluxe Success Kit for Writers ($49.95 including tips from Debbie, How to Write Your Novel by Meg Chittenden, audiotapes, and other tools for beginning writers).
I haven't done a book review before because I haven't found any writing books lately that were worth reviewing. In fact, I haven't been buying as many how-to books lately; almost anything I want to know I can find on the Web. But this book is different enough to merit its very own page.
Vogler takes the idea of the hero's journey, as described in Joseph Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces, and applies it to writing. Even if you have waded through Campbell's work or other analyses of myths, you'll want to read The Writer's Journey for its simplicity and its direct application to using the journey in creating works of fiction.
Vogler started out as a story analyst for the Walt Disney Company, where he wrote a seven- page memo titled "A Practical Guide to The Hero With a Thousand Faces." Check out A Practical Guide for a closer look. In it, he described the hero's journey, with examples from classic and current movies. His guide became so popular, he began to get requests from other studios for copies, which were handed out to writers, directors and producers. At the same time, Campbell's own ideas were brought to the public's awareness by Bill Moyers' PBS series of interviews with Campbell.
While Vogler's experience is in the field of script-writing, his ideas can be used in any fiction endeavor. I could see even short stories using parts of the journey as a template, and most novels and scripts will use the entire journey.
In The Writer's Journey, Vogler expands on the ideas in his original guide, taking the writer step-by-step through the journey. He uses examples from movies to illustrate his points, and ends by analyzing The Last of the Mohicans and Death Becomes Her.
The hero's journey, as described by Vogler, has twelve steps. Not every story will make use of every step. Nor will every story feature all of the archetypes Vogler delineates. After looking at a number of stories in these terms, however, I found that most use this basic structure. The steps of the journey are:
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