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Title: The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd Edition
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Manufacturer: Michael Wiese Productions
List Price: $26.95
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| The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd Edition by Michael Wiese Productions Complete and thorough overview on the sciende of screenwriting | Offering a detailed listing of every element you can think of in screewriting, this book is certain to please those with a passing interest in telling stories. Delving deeping into analytical commentary that includes storylines, story components, and character description, this book has everything needed to serve as reference when building a story.
Detailed in its description, it offers useful pointers on what works and why each storytelling element is needed.
Also very valuable are the illustrations and the handful of real-movie analysis included as appendixes. A must buy if interested in learning about screewriting and don't want to go through a list of manuals! | | The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd Edition by Michael Wiese Productions Brilliant | | This book was highly recommended to me from a professor, and it arrived in wonderful time and condition. | | The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd Edition by Michael Wiese Productions Must Have | This is a must have for any story teller.
It tells you about all those aspects that good writer's know intuitively but lays it all out there.
It's also a great read for the personal aspect.. it's almost a self-help book. It's a definite reframe on life. Puts me in mind of the theraputic aspects of writing. | | The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd Edition by Michael Wiese Productions Great Book!!! So much useful information, so much stuff to think about . . . | _The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd Edition_, by Christopher Vogler, is the result of the author spending decades studying what makes stories "work". And it is a very good book.
As he describes in the Introduction (actually, the introduction to the second edition, which he has reprinted in this book), Vogler worked as a story analyst for Hollywood studios and then encountered Joseph Campbell's Joseph Campbell's _The Hero with a Thousand Faces_ while attending USC film school. The work that would ultimately become _The Writer's Journey_ started out over twenty years ago as a seven-page memo titled "A Practical Guide to _The Hero with a Thousand Faces_" and Vogler has been field-testing, revising and updating his theories ever since. While some of his story elements are not quite the same as Campbell's, his way of dissecting stories is based on Campbell's and he refers back to Campbell's story elements often.
In _The Writer's Journey_ 3rd Edition, Vogler presents the various archetypal stages and characters that appear along a hero's journey in almost every story. And the hero in question doesn't have to be a knight going on a quest -- the hero is whoever the protagonist (male or female) is in a story, and their journey can be something as normal as a lonely person trying to find love, or an adult son or daughter learning how to deal with a demanding parent.
The hero can even be a writer trying to craft and publish a good story. As Vogler quietly points out in a number of places, the common themes and settings and characters that occur in almost all stories do so because they are encountered by almost everyone in real life. Just as the hero of any story has a backstory, a mentor in either the past or present whose advice is needed, and an adversary they have to face before they can complete their journey, all those things apply to all of us in real life as well. We all encounter mentors, threshold guardians, friends, messengers, and other elements in our lives, and Vogler's book can be seen also as a guide for readers to start evaluating their own lives and pursuing their own dreams.
The book includes the following sections:
+ Introduction: Third Edition
+ Preface: Second Edition
+ Introduction: Second Edition - Preparing for the Journey
+ Book One: Mapping the Journey
- A Practical Guide
- The Archetypes
- Hero
- Mentor: Wise Old Man or Woman
- Threshold Guardian
- Herald
- Shapeshifter
- Shadow
- Ally
- Trickster
+ Book Two: Stages of the Journey
- Ordinary World
- Call to Adventure
- Refusal of the Call
- Meeting with the Mentor
- Crossing the First Threshold
- Tests, Allies, Enemies
- Approach to the Inmost Cave
- The Ordeal
- Reward
- The Road Back
- The Resurrection
- Return with the Elixir
+ Epilogue: Looking Back on the Journey
+ Appendices
- Stories are Alive
- Polarity
- Catharis
- The Wisdom of the Body
- Trust the Path
+ Filmography
+ Bibliography
+ Index
+ About the Author
Since Vogler's background is in film, he often uses various movies to illustrate elements he is talking about. There are also exercises to identify elements of the journey in popular films and novels and in the reader's own life at the end of each section in Books One & Two, so _The Writer's Journey_ could be used as a textbook for a story-writing class or study group.
Overall, a very fascinating and thought-provoking book. Definitely a five-star read.
| | The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd Edition by Michael Wiese Productions Not outstanding | Mr. Vogler correctly asserts that there are 12 critical steps to building a heroic lead character that an audience can care about. That he needs nearly 400 pages to assert that fact is silly.
The key to writing is brevity, an element Vogler clearly hasn't mastered.
The writing is very academic in nature and repetitive as Vogler repeats what one hero or another does or what one writer or another does to construct the hero's journey. Very little of the information is synthesized; more often than not it is simply regurgitated. | | The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd Edition by Michael Wiese Productions Product Description | | See why this book has become an international best seller and a true classic. The Writer's Journey explores the powerful relationship between mythology and storytelling in a clear, concise style that's made it required reading for movie executives, screenwriters, playwrights, scholars, and fans of pop culture all over the world. The updated and revised third edition provides new insights and observations from Vogler's ongoing work on mythology's influence on stories, movies, and man himself. | | The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd Edition by Michael Wiese Productions Amazon.com | | At the beginning of The Writer's Journey, Christopher Vogler asserts that "all stories consist of a few common structural elements found universally in myths, fairy tales, dreams, and movies." Some may be hard-pressed to accept this idea (and will wonder how storytellers from Homer to Shakespeare to Robert Altman might respond to the proposition). Others may imagine that since Vogler uses movies like the Star Wars trilogy and The Lion King to defend his mythological philosophy, he is, unwittingly, listing the reasons why Hollywood films of the last 20 years have been so unimaginative. But there's no doubt that Vogler's notion, based on psychological writings by Carl Jung and the mythmaking philosophy of Joseph Campbell, has been profoundly influential. Many screenwriters have used Vogler's volume to understand why certain scenarios sell, and to discover a blueprint for creating mythic stories of their own. Now in its second edition, The Writer's Journey sets forth archetypes common in what Vogler calls "the hero's journey," the mythic structure that he claims all stories follow. In the book's first section, he lists the different kinds of typological characters who appear in stories. In the second, he discusses the stages of the journey through which the hero generally passes. The final, supplementary portion of the book explains in detail how films like Titanic and The Full Monty follow the patterns he has outlined. --Raphael Shargel |
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