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thomas_edmund 's review for:
The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers
by Christopher Vogler
On Writing books are always so hard to judge by their covers (ironically I guess) as in you never know how deep or practical the advice is going to get until you read it.
But thankfully Vogler's piece is one of the good ones. It's Hero's Journey based, meaning you're going to hear about Joseph Campbell and Archetypes. What I very much appreciated about this book though is Vogler presented what to date is my favourite balance of understanding the Journey as a "form" not a "formula" he doesn't wax lyrical about bizarre subconscious gobbledegook and explains the way that writers can tweak or adjust the Journey for their own purposes.
He also explains how storycraft is an evolving process not a set in stone program. In my opinion the amount of weight given and time spent on each stage of the journey and archetype is perfect for being useful and informative without adding too much pointless word-count.
There are a couple of strange additions though. Vogler dissects several films explaining the Hero's Journey within them, in some cases the examples are exactly what I mentioned - evidence of how flexible and variable the Hero's Journey should be! E.g. he examines Titanic which has pretty straightforward structure, but then Pulp Fiction, which IMO has anything but straightforward structure!
Then there is the appendices which are some topics that Vogler obviously wanted to riff on but didn't fit the story. I found these interesting, but not vital (so makes sense they weren't in the body of the text).
But thankfully Vogler's piece is one of the good ones. It's Hero's Journey based, meaning you're going to hear about Joseph Campbell and Archetypes. What I very much appreciated about this book though is Vogler presented what to date is my favourite balance of understanding the Journey as a "form" not a "formula" he doesn't wax lyrical about bizarre subconscious gobbledegook and explains the way that writers can tweak or adjust the Journey for their own purposes.
He also explains how storycraft is an evolving process not a set in stone program. In my opinion the amount of weight given and time spent on each stage of the journey and archetype is perfect for being useful and informative without adding too much pointless word-count.
There are a couple of strange additions though. Vogler dissects several films explaining the Hero's Journey within them, in some cases the examples are exactly what I mentioned - evidence of how flexible and variable the Hero's Journey should be! E.g. he examines Titanic which has pretty straightforward structure, but then Pulp Fiction, which IMO has anything but straightforward structure!
Then there is the appendices which are some topics that Vogler obviously wanted to riff on but didn't fit the story. I found these interesting, but not vital (so makes sense they weren't in the body of the text).