Story Structure #26: Wrap-Up

Hero’s Journey: Complete.

Writer’s Journey: Complete.

Whatever you want to call it, we made it through. Wasn’t too painful, was it?

Yet another disclaimer, as the series comes to a close: contained herein are my notes on Christopher Vogler’s work. Some it is verbatim from his book. Some of it I have taken great liberties with. My intent is only to share my organization of his ideas, in the hopes that it may be helpful to others. If you want to know exactly how well he lays it out, you should read The Writer’s Journey for yourself!

I get ahead of myself sometimes. I’m sure you don’t, but I do. I get excited, I get distracted, I get confused, and often I get out of my depth. I’m probably about to do all of those things spectacularly.

~Me, opening line of this series

I feel fairly good about all I’ve chewed into oblivion, digested, and spewed back out into this series, but I do feel like I got out of my depth, particularly in my handling of The Writer’s Journey. It was my favorite approach, to be sure, but surprisingly it was hard to summarize into notes that could make sense to anyone outside of my brain. The mythic approach is simply hard to convey in a shortened form. If you’re at all interested, I highly suggest you read the book. You’ll probably wonder how I managed to mangle it like I did. Nevertheless, the complete notes are posted below, for your printing enjoyment, and if you can get something out of them, that is wonderful and magnificent!

As a whole, working with both structure models has been a good experience for me. Expanding my horizons and all that. It was fun to organize myself enough to share with you all what I have learned, with varying degrees of coherency. I certainly didn’t do justice to the originals, but I hope you’ve gotten enough of a taste to whet your appetites for more, or to know that this whole structure business just ain’t for you!

I, for one, have learned a ton, but I’m still solidly on the fence – no hopping off in my foreseeable future – and will continue to embrace a ridiculous combination of pantsing and using the tools I have added to my toolbox to give my manuscript some sense of form. Balance, you know. We’ll see what becomes of it.

Happy Writing!
~ KJ

A FULL printable version of my notes on Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, complete with a bonus Character Arc, can be found here: Hero’s Journey: Complete

The FULL printable version of my notes on Larry Brooks’ Story Engineering, once again, can be found here: Four-Part Story Structure: Complete

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