A Practical Guide

The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Volger is a must read guide for any writer. The first chapter A Practical Guide introduces the Hero’s Journey, an extremely important structure of almost any story. The author talks about how almost every story, movie and play, follow a very similar structure. This includes twelve different steps starting with Ordinary World and ending with the return of the Elixir. These steps can be changed rearranged added to and taken away. Vogler talks about The hero with a thousand faces, a very influential book written by Joseph Campel. He is the first one that noticed, or recorded the similar pattern of all of the world’s stories since the beginning of time.
I never realized that almost every story is just the same story told over and over and in many different ways. This reading made me think a lot more about everything I have read. I’m an avid reader and have a hard time finding a book that did not follow this structure at all. Volger compared movies such as Star Wars and the Wizard of Oz. At first glance these movies seem so different, but when he analyzed them I noticed how similar they are. I have briefly been told about the Hero’s Journey but never thought about it before. It was very interesting how this is true. The stories that had the most success where the ones that showed the most change in a character as the story progressed. It is important to understand the structure of stories so that I can learn how to expand from that and create something new. Without a clear understanding of how writing works it is hard to improve on my own style. I like how different movies are used to explain the different steps in the Hero’s Journey. The author uses totally different stories but finds connections in each story that follows the Hero’s Journey.

1. How is the Hero’s Journey changed from story to story but still end up having the same structure?
2. Are there any other structures of writing/stories that do not follow The Hero’s Journey?
3. How does the Hero’s Journey relate to everyday life?