In today’s episode we take a break from discussing and analyzing creative fiction to examining possibly one of the most important, and certainly most stressful, nonfiction projects in a young person’s life: writing their college application essay.

Our guest, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Martha Mendoza, has been helping high school seniors with these essays for over a decade and is one of the organizers in her local school district’s annual essay mentoring program. In our discussion she talks about what makes these essays so difficult, gives advice for how seniors might choose topics and how we, as writers, might help a student out.

Remember, we have a Writers Process meetup every Wednesday. Check us out.

How do you shift your book’s hero from their nice, cozy ordinary world into the adventure? According to Christopher Vogler’s, The Writer’s Journey, you have them answer the call. In this episode we discuss the various forms the Call to Adventure can take, and also why, even the most willing hero must “refuse the call.”

To illustrate how this works in a non-movie example, we turn to John Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation Society that fulfills both these requirements in clever and witty ways. Remember, we have a Writers Process meetup every Wednesday.

Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey The Hero’s Journey Study Guide Subscribe to our Newsletter Does the mystery genre follow the Hero’s Journey? According to historical mystery writer Colette Clark. Not so much.  Join us for our discussion about how Colette structures her novels and figures out who the murder is (sometime just before she finishes…

If you have read even just the first part of a blog post on the Hero’s Journey, you know the hero starts off in the Ordinary World before embarking on their epic adventure. But the Ordinary World is more than a boring place the hero is itching to leave. 

According to Christopher Vogler in his book The Writer’s Journey, there’s a lot of that needs to be included in the Ordinary World section of the story. The writer must establish an interesting and sympathetic main character, set the mood and expectations, establish what’s at stake, and squeeze in backstory (using graceful exposition) and theme. 

That’s a lot to unpack, but we somehow manage in this podcast episode! There are many, many more subheadings in this very loooong chapter, but as we point out, most don’t need to be there. 

In our regular podcast, we’ve successfully made it through all of Vogler’s archetypes (from his book, The Writer’s Journey). Armed with this knowledge we decided to see if we could identify the archetypes in Kim’s novel, What our Comeback Tour is Slaying Monsters (coming out this October). Along the way, Renee “learned more about boy bands then I’ve known in my whole life!”

Remember, we have a Writers Process/Writing Sprint meetup every Wednesday. Check us out.

Are we done with archetypes now? Almost!

There are just three more archetype chapters in Christopher Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey, and we have issues with two of them.

The Shadow feels more like a force than a character and anyone from a legit supporting actor to unnamed gofer can be labeled an Ally. The one archetype we did like was the Trickster, whose actions and words can bring much needed chaos to your story. They all make for great discussions in this episode.

For literary examples we turned to Howl’s Moving Castle and The Witcher books and video games (NOT the show).

What if writing the first draft was the easy part?

Every week on serial writing websites like Royal Road, hundreds of authors will upload 5, 10, 20,000, or more words of their latest saga. Many of these magnum opuses are LitRPG, a genre that’s huge on Kindle Unlimited but pretty much unknown to most readers.

In today’s workshop we talk to LitRPG author and podcaster, Madix, about LitRPG, what makes it so popular with readers and writers, and his own decision to rewrite the opening book in his Torchbearer series.

And if you want to know more, check out his LitRPG podcast – CritRPG

Everyone who’s read a blog post on the Hero’s Journey can spot the Hero and Mentor archetypes, but what about a Threshold Guardian, or Herald, or elusive Shapeshifter?

Are these actual story archetypes or just personifications of the early stages in the Hero’s Journey? Do they play a significant role in modern narratives? And just how sexist is Christopher Vogler, in his book The Writer’s Journey, going to get in his descriptions of the femme fatal/temptress Shapeshifter? Find out what we have to say about these three archetypes in this episode—and boy, does Renee have things to say.

As a bonus, we draw upon Diana Wynne Jones’s book, Howl’s Moving Castle, for examples.

In response to Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousands Faces, aka The Hero’s Journey, folklorists and academics (many of them female) countered some of the major steps and archetypes that Campbell claimed were universal.

In today’s workshop we explore the some of the ideas of The Heroine’s Journey with author and academic, Elana Gomel. Using her just published dark fantasy Nine Levels, Elana shows how her protagonist doesn’t follow the Hero’s Journey, but the Heroine’s Journey, and eventually takes her own path entirely.

Check out her book here.

The Mentor — arguably the second most identified archetype from The Hero’s Journey (after the eponymous hero). In his book, The Writer’s Journey, Christopher Vogler has a lot to say about the mentor: why they are important, what they do, what kinds of mentors there are, and whether you actually need one in your story (okay, the last one might just be us).

In this episode, Kim and Renee discuss these points using examples from Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn!

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