Christopher Vogler The Writers Journey

[Violette Taps]

Ithas occurred to me that when I need to distribute handouts for my classes and presentations, I can simply post them here and direct people to chrisvogler.wordpress.com so they can read, save or print them as desired. So here, and in the previous couple of posts, are my essential handouts.

4. MEETING WITH THE MENTOR. The hero comes across a seasoned traveler of the worlds who gives him or her training, equipment, or advice that will help on the journey. Or the hero reaches within to a source of courage and wisdom.

10. THE ROAD BACK. About three-fourths of the way through the story, the hero is driven to complete the adventure, leaving the Special World to be sure the treasure is brought home. Often a chase scene signals the urgency and danger of the mission.

In stories, creatures like vampires or werewolves who change shape. In life, the shapeshifter represents change. The way other people (or our perceptions of them) keep changing. The opposite sex, the way people can be two-faced.

INNER AND OUTER PROBLEM. Every character should have an outer problem to solve, something physical or external. They should also have an inner problem, such as becoming a better team player, forgiving someone, learning to be more responsible, etc.

I believe we evolved the ability to tell stories because it has a survival advantage. We pay attention to the lessons of stories because we hope to gain some competitive advantage in the game of life.

A story works on our emotions by first creating IDENTIFICATION with a sympathetic or relatable hero, protagonist or main character. We must care about the hero and feel that in some way he or she is like us. A hero is someone who has DRIVES and DESIRES, as we all do.

Somewhere in the middle of the story, there should be some DARK MOMENTS when it looks like the hero has been defeated or even killed. The audience should be completely convinced that the hero has failed. Then there is a REBIRTH, when the hero comes back to life or starts to win again.

A story is also a contract with the audience. They give you something valuable, their time and focused attention, very rare things these days. In return you must give them something of equal value, a good story that changes them or their perspective in some way.

Studios have to process thousands of stories every year that come in the form of screenplays, treatments, novels, comic books, computer games, magazine articles, etc. They have developed certain standard documents to make the process more orderly.

The Log Line can be useful for writers too, as a short way of telling your story. The Log Line for Titanic would be: An adventure-loving young man, JACK, wins a ticket on the Titanic and falls in love with ROSE, a young woman who is being forced to marry a selfish RICH MAN. When the Rich Man discovers they are in love, he tries to hurt them but just then the ship hits an iceberg and begins to sink. Jack helps Rose survive and sacrifices himself for her, after making her promise to live her life for the both of them.

Even if people are not fighting or yelling at each other, there can be CONTRAST to attract the eyes of the audience. Artists say the human eye is attracted to areas of high contrast in any scene, and they will try to create high contrast in every drawing or painting. Characters should be very different from one another so we can enjoy this contrast. Walt Disney used this principle in his work, creating contrast between Mickey Mouse and his friend Goofy, or between Mickey and his friend Donald Duck. The musical sequences in FANTASIA provide a lot of contrast. One musical piece is slow and dreamy, while the next one is quick and funny, so the viewer never gets bored with the same thing.

The world of stories operates by some rules from the world of economics. There are only so many resources, such as time, the attention of the audience, and the budget. They must be used carefully and thoughtfully. Everything in a script (dialogue, description, action) should be done economically, with as few words as possible.

Everything in a script must be earned. Everything must be paid for. Heroes should earn their rewards by hard efforts. They should not be given greater rewards than they deserve. They should not be cheated, either. The audience will not be happy if the hero does not get a good reward, equal to the suffering or sacrifice he has experienced.

There should be poetic justice about the hero, too. If he has sacrificed his money or his safety for someone else, then perhaps that person repays him in a similar way, rewarding him with money or safety.

ARISTOTLE AND WHY HE IS IMPORTANT TO SCREENWRITERS When I went to film school, there were no screenwriting textbooks. There was only a book about play writing, THE ART OF DRAMATIC WRITING by Lajos Egri, and a little book written over two thousand years ago by a wise man in Greece, THE POETICS by the philosopher Aristotle.

My great teacher at the University of Southern California cinema school was Professor Irwin Blacker. He introduced us to The Poetics and made us read it even though it is difficult to understand and not always clear.

In THE POETICS, Aristotle was looking at Greek drama, a form of storytelling that was still evolving before his eyes. Every culture has some kind of theatre or drama, but something special was happening in Greece, and the writing of plays was rising to a high level of art, especially in the art of tragedy.

Good afternoon, and a good afternoon it is. First, I want to thank Dean of Academic Affairs Brian Walker, Department Chair of General Academics Will Linn, and the rest of the faculty of Hussian College for inviting me to address you today on this almost sacred occasion. I appreciate very much that they gave me ample time to prepare for my solemn duty, because I was able to get a good head start on my procrastinating.

I want to begin by congratulating you, the graduating class of 2022. Congratulations to you for enduring the rigors and demands of this program and opening your hearts to what it has to offer. Congratulations to your professors and staff, for dedicating all their time and energy to bring you to this threshold. Congratulations also to your parents, friends and loved ones who supported you and shared some of the struggles and challenges with you. Job well done all around. So, all of you give each other a well-deserved round of congratulation.

I could go on with my catalogue of little life lessons, but the point is, you will discover and invent your own. I encourage you to write them down and collect them, and keep reminding yourself of them every so often.

And I think that is your job description, healer of the planet. You are in line to be a special kind of hero, a culture hero. There are military heroes, scientist heroes, builder and nurturer heroes. But you will be the culture heroes. You are part of something, an ancient cult, a cult of culture, a heritage of people united in intention and belief, that stretches back to the Greeks and beyond. Way, way beyond. You are walking the road of the artist that winds back to the first shamans who danced to make peace with the spirits of nature and painted the great beasts of their world on the walls of their caves, who wore masks and made shadow plays about their gods and heroes by firelight. You are at one with those shamans, carrying on their work of healing their people with music, dance and stories brought at great cost from the worlds of the gods. Shamans are selected, as you have been, by unusual sensitivity or unusual hardship, that shatters them and transforms them into unique transmitters and interpreters of messages from the other world. In those times and right up to the ancient Greeks, all performances were religious, spiritual events. The actors, musicians and dancers gave themselves over to the spirits, gods and elemental forces they were trying to represent and connect with. The theater was a sacred space of transformation, attached to the temple that honored the mysterious god Dionysus, the wild, creative, inspiring god of actors and artists.

And that mission, I have come to believe, is nothing less than to heal the planet. Heaven knows, it needs healing. The world is sick, obviously, but it has always been sick and it has always needed the healing that only the arts can bring. To heal the planet, I think, is to master the art of controlling vibrations. Science and mysticism agree that everything is vibrating. Everything we can see, hear, taste and touch is vibrating, the air, the atoms, the earth itself, your own body. Even the audience is vibrating.

Your job, as I see it, is to improve the vibrational rate of the world, and of the audience, by helping people become more conscious through your arts. Raise the vibrational rate, tune it up, refine it, help your audiences discover themselves and connect with the world around them.

Old movies and cartoons on TV blew my mind. I saw patterns, same kind of scenes, same kind of camera moves, music and sound effects being repeated from movie to movie. Hitchcock, John Ford, swashbuckling Warner Bros. movies with Errol Flynn. Zorro, Superman, Batman!

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