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The Hero's Journey: A Pre-Nano Handout
Oct. 24th, 2011 04:26 pmSo, I taught Creative Writing for two years, and apart from my list of HANDY HANDY WRITING TIPS (which I say are tips but are really basically fundamental writing things), there was one handout I used almost exclusively. In honour of impending Nanowrimo, I'm just going to copy and paste the whole thing here.
It's basically a summation of Christopher Vogler's Hero's Journey - the part where he talks about structure, not characters. I always advise people to buy their own copy (US link here), if only to cement in their own head that they're Doing It Right when it comes to character creation and polarity of characters - but it's nice to have an almost checklist to follow when you're roughing out a structure, and these 12 steps are the ones you can plot every Hollywood film to.
EVERY Hollywood film.
And yes, writing rules don't work for everyone, but if this checklist can help you (as it helps me) then it was worth copypasta-ing it for you. <3
Each bullet point means either "DO YOU HAVE", "ONE OF THESE IS A GOOD IDEA" or "DO YOU KNOW THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION".
( The Hero's Journey )
It's basically a summation of Christopher Vogler's Hero's Journey - the part where he talks about structure, not characters. I always advise people to buy their own copy (US link here), if only to cement in their own head that they're Doing It Right when it comes to character creation and polarity of characters - but it's nice to have an almost checklist to follow when you're roughing out a structure, and these 12 steps are the ones you can plot every Hollywood film to.
EVERY Hollywood film.
And yes, writing rules don't work for everyone, but if this checklist can help you (as it helps me) then it was worth copypasta-ing it for you. <3
Each bullet point means either "DO YOU HAVE", "ONE OF THESE IS A GOOD IDEA" or "DO YOU KNOW THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION".
( The Hero's Journey )
