If I were asked to recommend the single most essential book for writers of popular fiction, I would not hesitate to name The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler.
If your budget only has room for one book, get this one. I know other teachers and bloggers and mentors will recommend others, but you asked me, so there's my answer.
I currently have two copies, the first edition from 1992, which is subtitled "Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters," and the third edition published in 2007, with the subtitle as above. There is also a 25th Anniversary Edition which was released in 2020. Even though I have two of the earlier editions, I just ordered the new one. It's that important.
So, why this book? Why not Strunk and White's Elements of Style? Or Stephen King's On Writing? Or Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird?
Because.
I've never liked Elements of Style. While it may be a good resource for grammar and syntax, its emphasis on brevity doesn't work as well for fiction as it does for non-fiction. Grammar, spelling, and writing style are important facets of skill no matter what you write, but fiction requires something way beyond that.
King's book is half memoir, half how-to, and while his personal history is interesting and gives insight into his writing, that very intimacy relegates the how-to half more to a "How I do it," as though what Stephen King does will work for everyone.
I've never read Bird by Bird. I never felt the need to.
I didn't discover The Writer's Journey until 1997, right before a writer's conference at which Christopher Vogler was going to be one of the featured speakers. I bought the book a week or so before the conference and devoured it. Vogler's presentation was supposed to last an hour; it stretched into almost three. He was far and away the best speaker I've ever heard.
That still doesn't answer your question. I'm getting to that.
Writing fiction, and in particular book-length popular genre fiction (as opposed to literary fiction, whatever that is), requires two skills: the ability to write and the ability to create stories. Most of us can be taught the basics of how to write. We learn the rudiments in school, even if we forget most of them and/or never use them after they're no longer required for graduation. Creating stories, on the other hand, isn't so easy to learn or to teach. It's more a process of recognizing whether or not you have that skill and then putting it into practice if in fact you do have it. If you don't, well . . . .
That may not be a popular opinion. No one who really wants to be a writer wants to be told they don't have the requisite story-telling talent. And in this age of digital self-publishing, even being told that isn't a barrier to publishing. It remains a sad fact, however, that there are many, many, many author-published books out there that just aren't very good.
For many of them, the author didn't have sufficient writing skill; even if there were a decent story in there, the writer couldn't bring it to life. For many others, the writing is passable, but the story isn't.
If the story is there, the writing can be fixed. If there's no story, no amount of fixing the writing will help.
The Writer's Journey explains what "story" is, how it's constructed of various parts, how those parts work together to complete the whole. Perhaps most important, Vogler explains how and why this structure is virtually universal, over time and across genres and through various media, by giving numerous examples.
"But but but, my story is different!"
No, my dear, it almost certainly is not.
Think about it. What makes us keep reading, keep turning the pages, even if they're only digital pages on electronic screens. "I need to know what happens next. Will they be eaten by the monster? Will she find her lost sister? Is the grandmother the killer? Will the volcano erupt? Who changed the nuclear codes?"
"I need to know what happens next."
That's the essence of story structure: How each element logically, naturally, and emotionally satisfyingly leads to the next.
Vogler's analysis is based on the works of Joseph Campbell and C.G. Jung, but being familiar with them is not at all necessary to understanding The Writer's Journey. While Campbell analyzed myth as a historical -- and universal -- form of narrative, Vogler applies the form to the process of contemporary storytelling. Campbell explains the hero's journey; Vogler shows you, the writer, how to create your own hero's journey and then make the journey with them.
As Shelly Lowenkopf pointed out in his 1982 article in The Writer magazine, "Creating a Rejection-Resistant Novel," you have to hook the reader at the beginning. Back then, the first person who read your (laboriously typed) manuscript on its journey to publication (or, more likely, rejection) might give you as many as three double-spaced pages to set that hook. Lowenkopf knew even then that many beginning writers are shocked to learn editors, agents, and the other gatekeepers of the traditional publishing business don't routinely read the whole book.
"But but but, mine is different!"
No, it probably isn't, and if it is, you still have to prove it. And you have to prove it in the first three pages. Or less.
As Josh Olson has written,
It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't.
(By the way, here's a simple way to find out if you're a writer. If you disagree with that statement, you're not a writer. Because, you see, writers are also readers.)
Josh Olson, "I will not read your fucking script," Village Voice, Sept 9, 2009.There's an even older adage that goes, "Write chapter one, write chapter two, throw away chapter one." In other words, you've probably put too much "stuff" in the first chapter that really doesn't need to be there. Get to the effing story already. The reader wants to know what's happening.
And that means starting your characters, your hero, on the journey. Where they will go, what adventures they will have, what problems they will encounter, what defeats and victories they will experience, all are part of that journey.
If you're not already a voracious reader, you probably won't be successful as a writer, but don't take just Josh Olson's word for it. Throughout The Writer's Journey Chris Vogler gives example after example of movies and books that follow the same mythic structure. You can read the books, you can watch the movies. The structure is there.
Vogler states clearly that it's not a "format." You can't just plug your individual characters and setting into a template and walk away with a successful, satisfying novel, regardless of genre. It's more of a palimpsest, an older, almost erased document of which parts remain and on which newer tales have been superimposed.
When I write, that structure is always at the back of my creative mind, the blueprint on which an entire novel will be built. It's also at the front of my mind when I'm writing a review. Is it there when I'm reading? I hope not! I want to read for enjoyment; I want the words on the page to disappear so completely that I'm immersed in the scene, the action, the emotions of the book. If I'm not, then the writer has done something wrong.
If you're a writer, do something right. Read at least one edition of The Writer's Journey. And if your budget allows it, buy a copy that you can have on hand to reference whenever necessary. You'll be tested on it later.
No comments:
Post a Comment