By: KatherineS,
on 10/16/2015
I approach myth from the standpoint of theories of myth, or generalizations about the origin, the function, and the subject matter of myth. There are hundreds of theories. They hail from anthropology, sociology, psychology, politics, literature, philosophy, and religious studies.
The post In defense of myth appeared first on OUPblog.
“Scientific studies have shown that people generally find women’s voices more pleasing than men’s,” writes Brandon Griggs in his October 21, 2011 article for CNN (“Why computer voices are …
By: Bruce Black,
on 4/26/2015
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By: Heather Dyer,
on 1/3/2015
By: Maryann Yin,
on 11/12/2014
How does one craft a hero? Scholar Joseph Campbell studied thousands of myths and found that a number of them follow a pattern that he calls the “hero’s journey.”
In the animated video above, educator Matthew Winkler explains this concept in detail. This TED-Ed lesson provides examples of famous characters whose stories follow the “hero’s journey” including Katniss Everdeen, Harry Potter, and Frodo Baggins.
This is our eighth NaNoWriMo Tip of the Day. To help GalleyCat readers take on the challenge of writing a draft for a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, we will be offering advice throughout the entire month.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
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By: Jason Boog,
on 9/29/2013
As Breaking Bad concluded its epic television run, one fan mapped out the epic TV series as a Dan Harmon story circle.
Community creator Harmon writes using a story circle, making sure that every script meets his eight steps of a satisfying story. As you can see by the chart embedded above (filled with spoilers), Breaking Bad contained all eight elements and can help aspiring storytellers master the elegant structure. Here’s more from Wired about Harmon’s method:
So he watched a lot of Die Hard, boiled down a lot of Joseph Campbell, and came up with the circle, an algorithm that distills a narrative into eight steps … Harmon calls his circles embryos—they contain all the elements needed for a satisfying story—and he uses them to map out nearly every turn on Community, from throwaway gags to entire seasons. If a plot doesn’t follow these steps, the embryo is invalid, and he starts over. To this day, Harmon still studies each film and TV show he watches, searching for his algorithm underneath, checking to see if the theory is airtight.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
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By: Laura A. H. Elliott,
on 9/25/2013
You know how sometimes the perfect quote comes along at the perfect time? When I read this a few weeks back it breathed new life into me. This quote made it very clear that I am exactly where I need to be. I hadn’t been paying attention to my own bliss for a very, very long time. Life is too short to give your bliss away. Are you following yours?
I’ll announce THE STORYTELLERS giveaway winners tomorrow….
By: Alan Silberberg,
on 8/30/2012
By: Martha Alderson, M.A.,
on 9/29/2011
The Mythic Journey Joseph Campbell so passionately explored and shared with the rest of us and Christopher Vogler so brilliantly captures by in his book Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers is part of the Universal Story.
The Universal Story is the heartbeat of the universe. It's in the undercurrent of every breath you take, every story you tell yourself, and all the stories you write. The Universal Story represents the story of one man changing and evolving as part of the bigger story of all of nature and world around us undergoing constant change and evolution.
An understanding of the Universal Story helps you arrange a story or when, having written, you find yourself mired and lost or simply curious about where you are and where you are headed or, at least, the general direction in which you are moving.
Character transformation in a story mirrors the Universal Story of rebirth. Rebirth contributes to the evolution of us all and delights those who harbor a secret belief in miracles. A character reunited with a long lost part of herself speaks to the possibilities in our own lives. Our inner intelligence whispers of the timelessness of birth, growth, death, and rebirth.
Stand away from all the words of your story and reconnect with the core or heart of the story itself. Examine the themes and the deeper meaning of the story. In viewing your stories minus the words, you can see a story worth the time and attention it is going to take to get it right
As your story evolves, you'll be evolving, too...
For more about the Universal Story and writing a novel, memoir or screenplay, visit Plot Series: How Do I Plot a Novel, Memoir, Screenplay? on YouTube. A directory of all the steps to the series is to the right of this post.
By: Martha Alderson, M.A.,
on 12/1/2009
For those of you who have not yet finished the 1st draft of your story, keep writing. I encourage you to reach the end. The Climax will help with the work you do here. While you write, follow the steps outlined here throughout the month. One should not interfere with the other but rather compliment each other. (If you haven't started writing and only have an idea for a story, ignore today's prompt and adapt all future suggestions to fit your needs.)
Today's step is easy. Print out a hard copy of your manuscript. That's it.
As tempting as it is with the manuscript sitting right there in front of you, remember, no reading. Not yet. Let the story sit. Let yourself unplug from the writing side. You are now entering the analytical side.
For those of you who shudder at the thought of structure or run from the concept of plot, I'd like to share Joseph Campbell's words:
"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life.
Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to the the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave that was so dreaded has become the center."
Plot and structure are the jewels. You'll see. Trust the process.
(If you're just joining us today, please read the last couple of posts to catch up.)
By: Darcy Pattison,
on 7/13/2009
I’ve been thinking about plot and looking through my library of writing books to see the big picture of how plot is discussed and taught, how writers approach plot. It seems to me that the discussions fall into about 9 camps.
1. Plot equals character. This camp says that the characters and their problems will move the story. If you know your characters well enough, they will get into and out of scraps and fights and interesting problems. Usually, but not always, this is accompanied with the encouragement to just start writing and see where the character takes you.
It seems to me that people who successfully write this way have a deeply ingrained, unconsciously competent, intuitive grasp of a story arc that includes a character facing his deepest fears and growing or changing some way as a result. As they write, they try to align the character with this inner sense of character. In Jack Bickham’s book, Scene & Structure, one appendix is of a Master Plot, detailing one particular way to conceive of the plot structure; authors who begin with character have an internal Master Plot of character.
Those who are unsuccessful at this approach can create interesting characters who do interesting things, but they don’t key in to the deepest fears, don’t make the character suffer and change and grow.
Other readings about starting with character:
2. Plot is a branching structure. If you start with a single statement, you can split it to two statements, and split that to four and that to eight and so on. Examples of proponents of this method are the Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method, and How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James N. Frey.
Basically, you start with the Deep Theme (Snowflake) or Premise (Frey) which could describe the entire novel in a single sentence. Then you develop it by making it two (or three) sentences. Then each of those is divided into several sentences, 4-6 sentences. And so on.
The key to this is knowing, rather than discovering, the deep theme or premise. Some people start from the thinnest of threads and need those exploratory drafts to find out about character and theme. If you fall into this camp, then use Snowflaking as a revision strategy, instead of a first draft strategy.
More reading:
3. Universal Plots. Some say there are only two plots in the world: a stranger comes to town or a character goes on a journey. Ronald Tobias’ book 20 Master Plots discusses some of the major universal plot schemes and generally lays out a structure for each; most helpful is when he designates some as character plots and others as action-oriented plots. For example the difference in a Quest and an Adventure is whether you focus on the inner or outer plot.
Other books in this vein are the classic from June & William Noble, Steal this Plot.
Or look at this 1916 book, which expresses the same idea of universality of plot:
4. Plot Patterns. Plot is a series of events that present the character with increasingly difficult choices until at the climax the conflict is resolved. This is the basic narrative arc you learned in high school. It may be enough to analyze a story by, but I’ve rarely seen it successful in leading a writer through the convolutions of plot.
However, there are patterns of plot which would fit the general idea of a narrative arc. The Hero’s Journey (orginally from Joseph Campbell, but best presented for writers by Christopher Vogler in The Writer’s Journey) establishes steps a character must face: call to action, denial, crossing the threshold, enemies & allies, approach to the inmost cave, supreme ordeal, reward, the road back, resurrection, return with elixir. John Vorhaus proposed a similar idea with his Comic Throughline in The Comic Toolbox.
I find this type pattern helpful because it fills in the smaller details left out by the English teacher’s description of plot. The Hero’s Journey is open-ended and general enough to allow for flexibility, while still being specific enough to point the writer in a useful direction. In other words, the English teacher’s plot says that the character faces a series of obstacles before reaching a final climax. The Hero’s Journey describes what some specific obstacles will look like AND it sequences those obstacles into an ideal timeline.
Do you use one of these plot paradigms? Why that one?
Tomorrow: 4 more variations of plotting.
Related posts:
By: Lucy Coats,
on 4/30/2009
"Imagine, if you will, a handful of families in Africa at the very beginning of the Human Race," said the BBC trailer. So I did. Inconceivable, really that that small group should have engendered the billions who live on the earth today. But it set me to wondering (as I occasionally do) about another thing entirely. Who told the first story? And when? We know that our early ancestors were certainly artists--the evidence is there in the caves of Lascaux and elsewhere. We know that the 'dreaming tracks' of the Aboriginal Australians go far far back in the history of mankind, mapping the land and territory in song lines--the rhythms of which correspond exactly to the walking pace of a human being. But story. Formal story. How did that happen? I am no anthropologist, and don't pretend to be. I have only my (fertile) imagination and my knowledge of a fair few world myths to go on. But one thing I am utterly sure of is this: that the first stories were told to make sense of the frightening world in which our ancestors lived, and the cataclysmic events around them. How to encompass the fear of an African storm with its terrifying dark sky full of fire and noise? How to tame the power of an all-destroying flood? Why, make it manageable by setting it within the bounds of story. We started telling stories to come to terms with the world around us. And if all story started in the heart of Africa with that same handful of families, then it is hardly surprising that we find the same mythical story themes in every culture. They are, most possibly, hard-wired into our DNA at the deepest level.
The most ancient stories not only make sense of the world, they also give us clues to pre-historical events, set out taboos and ways to behave (or not behave) and much more. They give us all the potential to share what Joseph Campbell called 'those fixed stars, that known horizon'. Myths--whenever they started--are one of the most important repositories of knowledge we possess, and every child, in every culture, should have access to a wide spread of them as part of their education. Most British schools teach Greek myths as part of KS2, and this is very good. Certainly my book Atticus the Storyteller's 100 Greek Myths has been a perennial favourite since its first publication in 2002, and the recent popularity of the Percy Jackson novels mean that Greek myth is thriving as never before. But what I find incomprehensible is that the majority of our schools are not encouraged within the curriculum to explore the myths of this land. Most children know about King Arthur from one source or another--and nothing wrong with that, except that he and his knights of the Round Table are the creation of a 12th century historian and a 15th century jailbird, stemming from the romance tradition of the medieval minstrels. But of the orally handed down pre-Christian epics of Cuchulain and Finn MacCool, Pwyll and Llew and Mabon, almost nothing is known by the average schoolchild in the UK, because there isn't the time for teaching it. This is, in my opinion a disgrace, and I do my best to counter it with every visit I make to a school, hoping to make a difference, and the children always respond with huge interest. This is a drop in the ocean, but I do not despair. There is always room for hope. The rise of fantasy novels since JRR Tolkien has meant that both modern children's and adult literature is full of clues to these things. The myths of this land of ours are there for the finding--and in my case, there for the retelling. Writers will go on plundering the mythical treasure chest, and reshaping its contents to suit the conditions of the modern world. Even if we no longer need to make sense of the thunder by telling fantastical tales about it, the parallel evolution of story and humankind is not finished yet, and it never will be as long as there are ears to listen to all the infinite number of tales there still are in our future lives. Do you think that our small handful of ancestors in Africa could ever have imagined such a thing?
By: Martha Alderson, M.A.,
on 12/2/2008
For those of you who have not yet finished the 1st draft of your story, keep writing. I encourage you to reach the end. The climax will help with the work you do here. While you write, also follow the steps outlined here throughout the month. One should not interfere with the other, but rather compliment each other.
Today's step is easy. Print out a hard copy of your manuscript. That's it.
As tempting as it is with the manuscript sitting right there in front of you, remember, no reading. Not yet. Let the story sit. Let yourself unplug from the writing side. You are now entering the analytical side.
For those of you who shudder at the thought of structure or run from the concept of plot, I'd like to share Joseph Campbell's words:
"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life.
Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to the the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave that was so dreaded has become the center."
Plot and structure are the jewels. You'll see. Trust the process.
(If you're just joining us today, please read the last couple of posts to catch up.)
great post! i eally liked it! thanks for sharing!