_The Writer's Journey_ and the writer's journey
Ugh. I’ve survived week two of NaNo. It often seems the hardest for me - the shininess of starting is gone, but you’re not close enough to the end to feel anything but stuck in the middle of a pile of writing that suddenly seems really crappy to you. My J2!BJD is going OK, thanks mostly to the fact that there’s an extant plot outline for me to follow; looking at the way I’ve broken the scenes out it’s unlikely that I’ll finish in November, though, but I promise to keep going until I’m done. The larger, non-fannish project that I’m wrapping the J2 within doesn’t have the benefit of a detailed plot outline - or at least it didn’t until I took some time and created the skeleton of one.
In an attempt to think about structure, I started reading a book I’d had in the TBR pile: The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, by Christopher Vogler. He attempts to apply the principles of universal myth as examined by Joseph Campbell to both the structure and the process of writing. (It still kinda cracks me up how excited people who are a bit older than me got about Joseph Campbell’s work at the time it became popular; I suppose I take it as a given that there are universals in human storytelling, so I guess Campbell’s paradigm shift worked.) Although most of his examples are movies and the structure would be best applied to screenplays, I do think it’s worth a read. I can see how it would be useful to all writers and artists - if not used as a specific step-by-step guide, just as a reminder of the larger themes that should appear in everyone’s work and serve to give it depth.
In an attempt to think about structure, I started reading a book I’d had in the TBR pile: The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, by Christopher Vogler. He attempts to apply the principles of universal myth as examined by Joseph Campbell to both the structure and the process of writing. (It still kinda cracks me up how excited people who are a bit older than me got about Joseph Campbell’s work at the time it became popular; I suppose I take it as a given that there are universals in human storytelling, so I guess Campbell’s paradigm shift worked.) Although most of his examples are movies and the structure would be best applied to screenplays, I do think it’s worth a read. I can see how it would be useful to all writers and artists - if not used as a specific step-by-step guide, just as a reminder of the larger themes that should appear in everyone’s work and serve to give it depth.