On the "Hero's Journey" in Books and Film

Several months ago, I picked up a copy of Christopher Vogler's THE WRITER'S JOURNEY: MYTHIC STRUCTURE FOR WRITERS. While the fact that he managed to use 'writer' twice in the title was indicative of his generally weak writing style, I thought it was an interesting look at how stories are formed using common archetypes and story arcs. He draws heavily on his experience as a screenwriter to demonstrate how most stories -- particularly blockbusters like action, fantasy, and romantic comedy -- follow a familiar cycle in which the hero/heroine goes off on a quest and must find their own holy grail before returning to their known world.

This all seems quite obvious and not worth the $17.79 that the book currently runs on Amazon (full retail is $26.95, which is steep for a paperback). However, I recently reread it, and as I've watched movies and read books over the last few days, I have been struck by how accurate his analysis was. Between yesterday and today, I watched BRUCE ALMIGHTY and FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL and read THE GRAVEYARD BOOK by Neil Gaiman (which I shall review sometime soon). While the stories were quite different -- man at a crossroads dealing with faith issues in a comedic manner, man on a mission to forget his ex and find love with the new girl, and small boy raised in a graveyard until he can take revenge on his family's killer -- all three of them had structures that adhered closely to Vogler's analysis of the ideal story framework.

What I find interesting about writing romance is that there is such a clearly defined set of rules for the genre -- particularly for historicals, the hero and heroine can't be involved with other people while involved with each other, the story must explore two people falling in love, and the story must end with the hero and heroine either married or engaged (almost always married). The challenge is to take a set of rules and write a story that adheres to the strictures while still feeling fresh and original. The rules provide a form that sets the reader up to be pleased and prepares them for a happy ending -- but the writer must get to that happy ending through several hundred pages that create doubt about the ending and provide the reader with a satisfying emotional journey as the hero/heroine grow through the power of love.

This is all a lovely challenge for me; when I started writing AN INCONVENIENT MARRIAGE, I only had the first section and the last mapped out. The rest all came to me while I worked through the manuscript, resulting in extensive rewriting during the second draft to fit all the pieces together. But as I begin to plot out book number two, I think THE WRITER'S JOURNEY could at least help me to set things up in a slightly more unified way, even if the process of writing itself will still lead to a massive overhaul after I finish the first draft.

I'll keep discussing craft and storytelling as I begin work on book number two. Meanwhile, what's your favorite story? What do you love about it?

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Either people think that books make excellent holiday gifts, or else I've trained my family well. For Christmas this year, I unwrapped the following books:

* The Bell at Sealey Head by Patricia McKillip
* The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
* The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (technically I didn't unwrap this -- it was in my stocking)
* Vicious Circle by Mike Carey
* The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England by Amanda Vickrey
* Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics by Ina Garten
* Book of Soups by the Culinary Institute of America

Hmm. Cookbooks, fantasy, literature, and history -- it's no wonder that my brother indicated that I'm turning old and lame before my time. He had corroborating evidence in the form of my other gifts, since I got a heating pad, a teapot warmer, and several kitchen gadgets, all at my request.

But so what if I'm old -- hopefully I've done my small part to help the publishing industry this year. Between the seven books I received and the six books I gave this Christmas season, I feel rather proud about fulfilling my civic duty. Now I'm going to curl up under the covers, listen to the ice cracking outside my window, and start one of my new books. Merry Christmas!

eBook Readers - Resistance is Futile

From the NEW YORK TIMES today: "Turning Page, E-Books Start to Take Hold"

And you can hear the tortured screams of bibliophiles everywhere. Personally, I'm holding off on getting a Kindle or any other ebook reader -- while I love the feel of hot new technology in my grasping hands, I feel that it's prudent to wait for the product to improve (and to clear out the 70+ TBR books on my shelves before adding a device that will make my TBR woes worse).

However, while I will always have a soft place in my heart for printed books, and while I will likely want to have them in copious amounts even if I start using a reader as my primary content provider, ebook readers are the way of the future. I think at some point in the future, we will all just have a handheld screen with us that serves as our television, our movie theatre, our stereo, our library, and our online lifeline. If you read sci-fi, you may also see it as a grim, new-world-order harbinger of the days when our global overlords will use it to provide an endless stream of propaganda, but I'll take my chances.

And really, is this that much different than the advent of the printing press? I would bet you a copy of my yet-to-be-published book that when the Gutenberg Bible first arrived, there were legions of monks who were (piously, quietly) up in arms about the death of the hand-printing industry, with all the same concerns about quality, look-and-feel, and relative cost as we're hearing from the publishing industry today. And yet what ended up happening was a revolution in terms of availability of information to the masses, information that would change the world. Ebook readers offer the same promise -- give kids excellent stories on the same screen that currently provides them with movies, and you might see a reading rebirth that no one could have predicted when musty old paper volumes were the only path to readership.

What do you think? Are you rushing out to buy a reader, or are you holding out until the last page is ripped from your hands?

Apparently I'm Destroying My Life...

Check out this article in TIME magazine: "Are Romantic Movies Bad For You?"

My favorite quote: "'Idealism has a role to play — it can convince us that no matter how misshapen, decrepit, or dull we are, there is someone out there for us.'" I love that a fellow at the British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy implied that romantic comedies were good for the misshapen, decrepit and dull. That really just makes me want to go out and salve my wounds with half a dozen viewings of LOVE ACTUALLY.

Really, I do want to watch LOVE ACTUALLY now. Sadly, it's in my apartment in California, and I'm in my parents' house in Iowa for the holidays. But I think it's one of my favorite romantic comedies ever, possibly because the characters are mostly absurd and some of the stories end on a melancholy note. Or possibly because some of the characters seem "misshapen, decrepit, and dull" themselves, which trumps the ridiculous machinations of some of the impossibly-perfect heroes and heroines in general boilerplate romcoms.

I fully intend to keep destroying my ability to form real relationships by reading romance over the holidays. What are you reading and/or watching?

75 Books Every Woman Should Read - My Picks

Continuing with the theme of procrastinating by posting lists, check out this list of "75 Books That Every Woman Should Read" from jezebel.com. It's in response to an Esquire list of books that every man should read (which, for what it's worth, includes THE GRAPES OF WRATH because of the "titty" -- it's like the magazine stereotypes itself).

List, with my comments, is below. I've read thirteen -- how many have you read?

• The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
• To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
• White Teeth, Zadie Smith - I loved this book - perhaps one of my favorites on this list!
• The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende - sitting on my to-be-read (TBR) shelf, and has been for half a decade
  
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
• Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
• The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath - not exactly warm and fuzzy, but a great read
  
• Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
• The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri - I of course felt compelled to read this when I moved to India, but I didn't like it as much as I apparently should have
  
• Beloved, Toni Morrison
• Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
• Like Life, Lorrie Moore
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen - I would lose my romance card if I hadn't read this
  
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë - this book is great, even if it's a bit strange to fall in love with someone whose insane wife is locked in the attic
  
• The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
• A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
• A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor - I've read a couple of stories out of this collection, but I won't count this as a full read
  
• The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
• You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee - amazingly, we actually read this in high school, although I believe we also watched the movie; this was one step up from THE SCARLET LETTER, which we watched rather than read
  
• Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
• Earthly Paradise, Colette
• Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
• Property, Valerie Martin
• Middlemarch, George Eliot - TBR
  
• Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
• The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir - TBR, sitting on the main TBR shelf; maybe I'll get to it this year
  
• Runaway, Alice Munro
• The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
• The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
• Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë - I've read this, but don't remember liking it as much as I thought I would
  
• You Must Remember This, Joyce Carol Oates
• Little Women, Louisa May Alcott - I loved this book; I also loved LITTLE MEN, which took place after Jo married and started taking in orphaned boys, but it's a totally different story
  
• Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
• The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
• I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
• A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith - is it bad that I've never read this?
  
• And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie - I LOVED this mystery, even if the title was originally something that had to be sanitized several times for a more politically-correct audience
  
• Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
• The Secret History, Donna Tartt
• The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley
• The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
• The Group, Mary McCarthy
• Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
• The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
• The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank - I've read it and seen her house in Holland
  
• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley - yes
  
• Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
• In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
• The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck - I adored this book, and wrote some college entrance essays on it -- even though China was worlds away from my small-town life in Iowa, I've always been fascinated by the lure of the land and tales of generational conflict
  
• Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
• Three Junes, Julia Glass
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
• Sophie's Choice, William Styron
• Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
• Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
• Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell - yes
  
• The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera - TBR
  
• The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn
• My Antonia, Willa Cather - one of the great books I read as a teenager; it also lead to a fierce argument with my best friend's mother over the pronunciation of "Antonia"
  
• Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez - I liked this book, although I'm surprised that it was picked; ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE is perhaps my favorite book of all time
  
• The Harsh Voice, Rebecca West
• Spending, Mary Gordon
• The Lover, Marguerite Duras
• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
• Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
• Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
• Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
• Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
• I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith - I haven't read this, but I saw the movie and liked it
  
• Possession, A.S. Byatt

Given that I used to be a completely avid reader, thirteen is nothing to write home about. But, my avid reading phase stopped sometime in college, and many of these books are too depressing for my current, sadness-avoiding tastes.

What about you? What do you think is missing? Are there books on the list that shouldn't be?