[Link] HOW TO WRITE THE WAY I WRITE, Part 3: Mythic Structure and Me! ...I mean, and You!

by Dan Jolley

I had been getting paid to write for seven or eight years before I was introduced to the book you see up there: The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler. It changed - profoundly changed - how I did my job. I wish I had found out about it much earlier. Like, when I was about six.

I was at a con (either Dragon*Con in Atlanta or MegaCon in Tampa, I don't remember which) when I met Scott Ciencin, another freelance writer. Whereas I had been concentrating on comic books, Scott had made a name for himself as a novelist, working primarily in licensed-property novels. Scott had read a couple of my comics and enjoyed them, and he and I started talking on the phone pretty regularly. During one of those conversations he asked me if I had read The Writer's Journey.

"Nope," I responded. "What's that?"

Very seriously and, as I soon came to discover, completely accurately, Scott said, "It's the keys to the kingdom."

I didn't know a single thing at the time about Joseph Campbell, or the work he had done combing through an entire civilization's worth of culture to produce The Hero With a Thousand Faces. I didn't know anything at all about how Christopher Vogler distilled Campbell's work and turned it into, essentially, a how-to guide for storytellers. But I would soon learn. And because of that, my productivity was about to skyrocket.

Let me see if I can break it down quickly here...

Continue reading: http://danjolley.blogspot.com/2012/06/how-to-write-way-i-write-part-3-mythic.html

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