You are Now Leaving the Ordinary World
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...
Boy Bands & Archetypes
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...
The Role of the Trickster and Other Archetypes
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...
Workshop with Madix: Writing and Revising LitRPG
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...
Female Shapeshifters and Other Questionable Archetypes
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...
Workshop with Elana Gomel: What to do if your Hero is a Girl?
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...
The Mentor Behind Every Great Hero
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...
Workshop: Plotting a Murder with Colette Clark
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...