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: Renee Creates a Monster-Hero
Last episode we explored the concept of the hero archetype as presented in Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey. But analysis is one thing; we wanted to see if we could use the ideas to create/develop an actual protagonist. Renee's has a Frankenstein story idea (she so badly wants to read...
What Makes a Hero
Whether every protagonist is a Hero is open to debate (and debate it we do in this episode) but on it we can agree that the vast majority of protagonists in genre fiction are heroes (if not always heroic). In today’s episode we go deep into Christopher Vogler’s chapter...
Workshop: Mapping Kim’s Novel to the Hero’s Journey
Writing Workshop with Kim & ReneeThe Writer’s Journey Subscribe to our Newsletter The Hero’s Journey Study Guide The Writing Workshop Exercise Map your Novel according to Vogler’s The Hero Journey. Last episode we mapped all 12 steps of Christopher Volger’s Hero’s Journey (as presented in his book, The Writer’s...
Mapping the Hero’s Journey
We’ve officially started our new book, Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey. And boy is there a lot in the first two chapters! First (or first after Kim’s rant) is an overview of the Hero’s Journey, yes, dear listener, we cover all twelve steps. And as examples for those steps we...
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...