Vogler's Writer's Journey...

"Stories built on the model of the Hero's Journey have an appeal that can be felt by everyone, because they well up from a universal source in the shared unconscious and reflect universal concerns."

This quote is interesting because we seem to gravitate to what we know and feel. As humans and in life, we go through highs and lows and are challenged to make difficult decisions. Whether it be self-improvement, a career change, or a shot at love, we are put in positions to make those choices. In stories, the hero is constantly faced with altering decision making and that is what we can relate to.

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"If you're going to show a fish out of his customary element, you first have to show him in that Ordinary World to create a vivid contrast with the strange new world he is about to enter."

Many hero journeys begin this way. It gives the audience a sense of "what a regular" person they are in the story. A movie that does this well is the original Jumanji. It begins with Alan (the hero) amongst school and gets beaten up. We feel a sense of sympathy for Alan. Once he is home and starts to play the board game Jumanji, he is presented with the Call to Adventure.

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"The Hero's Journey grows and matures as new experiments are tried within its framework. Changing the traditional sex and relative ages of the archetypes only makes it more interesting, and allows ever more complex webs of understanding to be spun among them. The basic figures can be combined, or each can be divided into several characters to show different aspects of the same idea."

Vogler's structure for the stages of the Hero's Journey, create a framework that can be mixed, matched or subtracted from to provide interesting story lines. It will be interesting to implement these concepts in the stories we are creating.

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