A writer friend loaned me her copy of Christopher Vogler’s “The Writer’s Journey” in order to help me with my writing. This book belongs on every fiction writer’s bookshelf. Whether you write short stories or multi-volume epic sagas, this book has valuable information that will help you organize and structure your work. Building on the work of Joseph Campbell, this book is easy to read and understand where Joseph Campbell’s book is scholarly and dependent on a higher level of educational background.
If you are a writer, I challenge you to read this book and then go back through your works and pick out the thematic elements that you naturally included in your work that follow the structure demonstrated in this. I think you will be surprised to see how much of this structure you already follow and how you can improve your work by incorporating the offered suggestions.
As a reader, you can benefit from this book by being better able to analyze the works you read. You will be able to pick out the slavish adherents to the patterns from the truly creative. The information in this book will help you understand any story’s structure and better appreciate the story whether the work is a ballet, a movie, a novel or an epic poem.
The book is easy to read and follows the structure it espouses. It is pedantic in places, but if that is the worst I can say about a book, I would not worry about being put off by it.
I am sure there are other books that cover this territory, but this is a good one.
Bob Cherny
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Comments: 2
I used to think I'd write a poem, maybe rewrite it, then that was that. After Julia Cameron's book, and her THE SOUND OF PAPER, I became more patient with my writing, more organic.
After a few years of an increased output, I've written, for example, scribbled notes which became poems, written poems which became plays, and made notes in front of three pictures in an Edinburgh art gallery and transformed them into an assignment for one of my uni courses (as a mature student!).
With my more patient approach, I've written and redrafted some of my work a number of times; one assignment I redrafted nine times until I was happy for it to be presented to my tutor!
Some of the credit should go to Julia Cameron and her words!
I completely agree.
I think we as writers should encourage our colleagues to read more books on the craft of writing instead of assuming, as I did, that they alone knew what was right. If posts on some of the other author forums I follow are any indication, grammar is a challenge for many supposedly literate people.