The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers
by Christopher Vogler
Paperback: 326 pages
Publisher: Michael Wiese Productions
ISBN: 0941188701; 2nd edition (November 1998)
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0941188701/ref=pd_pym_cp_1/102-9525869-2383364


I found this book very useful and very enlightening. It will help you better understand any story. You can read the book in about 2-3 days. It might take a week or two to absorb all the ideas.

The book is about the psychology of stories. It comes across as very "touchy feely" but I found the concepts to be very potent for analyzing any type of story, even game shows. You might want to take a crack at analyzing "Jeopardy", or "American Idol" it can be very entertaining and interesting. For those of you that try this, I'd love to hear what you think Alex Trebec, Simon, and Paula Abdul represent.

The author has been able to successfully use his ideas in several high profile movies. The end of the book has a nice section that analyzes several movies using the author's concepts.

NOTES:
There is also a companion book called - Myth and the Movies: Discovering the Mythic Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films. This book takes the ideas in the "The Writer's Journey" and applies them to 50 movies.

I am currently slogging through the companion book - courtesy of a NetFlix subscription :-) So far it's a great way to really get into the guts of some good movies. My personal favorite so far - analyzing Hitchcock that's a real treat.

In this book "The Writer's Journey," Vogler carefully dissects the Hero's journey, a mythic structure of discovery in our culture that was noted by both Carl Jung in his archtypes and Joseph Campbell in his catalog of mythic structures.

The weakness of Vogler's book is that it tells of only one story type. Although I have found that the "hero's journey" is very well suited for film, other stories such as the social structure of love as used by the romance novelists are also deep structures in our society. A good reference to other types of mythic story structures is in Jospeh Campbell's Mask of God series.

If you want to know more about the "hero's journey," The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Cambell, ISBN: 0-691-01784-0 is a good read. It fills out the whys and wherefores that Vogler has missed.