Monday, October 10, 2016

Here's What I Love about Christopher Vogler's "The Writer's Journey."

Christopher Vogler's thesis underscoring his entire body of work is that a certain kind of story has an amazing power to attract readers and viewers and turn them into ardent fans.

The author believes that "all stories consist of a few common structural elements found universally in myths, fairy tales, dreams and movies. These are known collectively as The Hero's Journey."

Here's what I love about Vogler: His assertion that writers have tremendous power to lift up and heal their readers as well as themselves from traumas and hurts.

Vogler wants all writers of every stripe to become aware of the hero-story structure so that they can tap into and leverage the magical powers of this kind of story. He writes that, depending on how they tell their hero stories, writers have the power to: 

-Leave this world a better place than they found it.

-Heal peoples' hurts, traumas, fears, recurring nightmares, etc., everything that keeps them down. Writers can heal themselves, too.

-Help people grow emotionally and live on a higher plane, with more emotional intelligence.

-Inspire and instruct people on how to deal more effectively with practical yet difficult-to-solve life problems; learn how to create better and more trusting and satisfying relationships; and learn how to become more human and vulnerable, and how to grow one's own humanity.

In my view, Vogler exalts the role of the storyteller to be that of a creator working alongside the ultimate creator, God, to improve and/or fix the world.

 

I stated another reason I admire Vogler's book in my June EWA:  "In his book Vogler not only gives us tools for understanding our own life story better; he also gives storytellers guidance on how to tap into powerful myths as they go about structuring their stories."

Notice that word, "structuring." This is a book primarily about story structure. Vogler believes that when a story is structured so that it borrows from ancient myth or personal hero myths, it can have tremendous reader appeal as a book as well as  viewer appeal as a movie.

For example, the perennial popularity of Star Wars stems from the way it interprets personal hero myth, telling an epic story that shares certain elements found in ancient myths.

 

Think of this book as an "instruction manual on the art of being human," or to put it another way, "on the art of being a complete human being."

The author sets out the communication objective for this book in the Preface to his Second Edition: "In this book I describe the set of concepts known as 'The Hero's Journey' drawn from the psychology of Carl G. Jung and the mythic studies of Joseph Campbell. I tried to relate those ideas to contemporary storytelling, hoping to create a writer's guide to those valuable gifts from our innermost selves and our most distant past. I came looking for design principals of storytelling, but on the road I found something more: a set of principles for living. I came to believe that the Hero's Journey is nothing less than a handbook for life, a complete instruction manual in the art of being human."

This is a key thought: "The Hero's Journey is not an invention, but an observation," writes Vogler. "It is a recognition of a beautiful design, a set of principles that govern the conduct of life and the world of storytelling the way physics and chemistry govern the physical world."

Next month I'll conclude my discusssion of The Writer's Journey by describing six types of flawed heroes and eight kinds of archetypes.