Annotative Bibliography #10

Vogler, Christopher. “Epilogue: Looking Back on the Journey” The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. 3rd ed. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2007.

The next section of the writer’s journey is “Epilogue: Looking Back on the Journey”. In this section, or chapter of the book, Vogler pretty much reviews everything we were taught in the book. He uses five movies to help further explain the hero’s stages. He uses The Titanic, Pulp Fiction, The Lion King, The Full Monty, and Star Wars. He first stresses that his book is NOT to be used as an outline for someone who is writing a story. Rather, it is supposed to be used as a guideline, to help a writer with their creative process. On the first page of this book, he challenges us to analyze a book or movie using the writer’s journey. I am going to do a short analysis on the movie Man on Fire, starring Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning. This is an excellent example of a story line that doesn’t follow the hero’s journey perfectly. There are several ordinary worlds and conflicts in the story. We are introduced to Creasy’s ordinary world, of an ex-assassin, drunk, who is looking for work. Then we are introduced to Pita’s ordinary world, a very intelligent child who was born into what we presume is a wealthy family. Both characters gain rewards and face their demos in this story. I find it very interesting because I think both of the main characters, who at first have different goals to accomplish. When Pita gets kidnapped, the true hero is show as Creasy and he won’t stop until he revenges Pita. The Titanic is another example of a story that doesn’t follow the Hero’s stages perfectly.

This book has really helped me understand story writing at a whole new level. Before I read this book, I really did not understand that stories, plays, movies, etc. are all mostly written the same way. They all have the same basic type of plot lines, with the same archetypes, and the same stages to the story. The hero always must face some basic type of fear before leave on the journey. Every hero also must have some sort of “villain”. I think it is interesting that people from all around the world, who have a totally different type of culture, all enjoy the same basic type of story structure. In this last section we read, I enjoyed how Vogler touched upon five different movies: The Titanic, Pulp Fiction, The Lion King, The Full Monty, and Star Wars. The only two movies out of those five I have seen are Titanic and The Lion King.

1. Name the 12 stages in the hero’s journey (page 8).

2. Give an example of each of the 8 most common archetypes (page 26).

3. Pick a story or a movie yourself and analyze it using Vogler’s stages of the hero’s journey.