Rating: 
Summary: Not for me
Review: I bought this book with high expectations, having read the rave reviews. The reality is that it is a laboured list of arbitrary mythological archetypes fashioned into a kind of template for use in writing stories. He cites - and is in fact some kind of apostle for - Joseph Campbell whose book "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" he really seems to be summarising. I didn't like this book. I did not get on with it. I do not feel that it could help me wrestle with the demons and demands of pegging a plot out. It is too full of politically correct genuflection for me to take it seriously. Add to this the fact that Vogler uses this ridiculous alternating personal pronoun (referring to the author every second time as 'she', etc.) which is annoying, incorrect English, and highly distracting, and you have a book which fails for me both in terms of form and content. Other people liked it, and they are welcome to their view. If you consider yourself progressive and see no contradictions in the current ethos of "equality" and "liberalism" you probably will, too. But I found it vacuous and annoying. If you want a manly, vibrant read Robert McKee's "Story".
Rating: 
Summary: Essential tool for the Writer and Movie Enthusiast
Review: Probably the single most important book I've purchased other than Dixon's GMC book in helping my plotting. Vogler takes various movies and applying concepts from the much more dense (and difficult to understand) Hero with a Thousand Faces book by Conrad, he shows us how many movies use a 12 step process for creating their external plots. He also uses these movies and breaks them down to show us how writers of fiction or screenplays can take these steps and apply them to our own writing. The steps are the kind where you go "Aha! Yeah, that makes SO much sense" and really create a nice skeleton for you to frame your work around...whether it's romance, thrillers, adventures, drama. A definite must for any writer.
Rating:
Summary: New to plotting
Review: Writer's Journey is a very practical guide to plotting. While working out a plot for my first attempt at writing a novel, this book helped me visualize an overall structure. Reading through it stimulated ideas for my own story. I expect I'll come back to this book again and again during my writing career.
Rating: 
Summary: Campbell Commercialized
Review: I purchased this book in order to nudge the unravelling of a Gordian knot in an outline for a story idea of my own. Happily, it worked--and without having to use Alexander the Great's brute force solution.
Vogler uses Joseph Campbell's book "A Hero With a Thousand Faces", strips off most of the myth retelling and formulates a step-by-step process from Campbell's archetypes that will take your protagonist through the slice-of-life upon which your novel or screenplay centers.
You may get the impression that manipulating Vogler/Campbell's formula ensures some degree of commercial success, but that that success will be disappointingly routine, merely run-of-the-mill. Vogler says 'no'; the hero's journey in the hands of a capable writer can be as fresh, new and different as the film 'Pulp Fiction' is to the animated classic, 'The Lion King' (both films are used as examples in the appendix as to how the basic outline applies). In the first portion of the book, he supplies all of Campbell's hero archetypes with examples which thankfully move beyond Star Wars and the Indiana Jones Trilogy. In the second half of the book, he guides us through a generic hero's journey, providing a variety of options from which to springboard the story. At the end of each of the journey's legs, he analyzes "The Wizard of Oz" to illustrate a most masterful use of the outline and the archetypes.
If you are a writer or a student of film, this book 'Cliff-Notes' Campbell's classic. It provides a greater understanding of what an audience expects from a good story. If you want a book that again formulates an outline of the hero's journey in a 'how-to' fashion, take a look at "The Key" by Frey--this book is even more simplistic than Vogler's--Frey gets into developing character biographies before setting the hero on his journey, although his example is trite and almost silly.
I recommend the book because just reading it will set your mind thinking, sometimes with disgust at the formulas that you can see in all major films, but mostly with some grain of creativity that you can harvest to something special, not just marketable.
Rating: 
Summary: Skip this book - go directly to Campbell
Review: As a big fan of all things mythological and story-telling, I would urge you to skip this book and read some original sourcework - such as Campbell and Jung. The recent review about the formulaic storytelling of Hollywood rang true with me. Yes, one can deconstruct many movies through an architypal lens, but creativity must come from a deeper place.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Tool
Review: This is a book that all writers should read. It is the most useful information I've found on plotting. Forget all the other books - this one explains the archetypes of a classic Hero's tale and how it can relate to any genre of story.
Rating: 
Summary: A starting point
Review: Written down to studio executives with low IQs and short attention spans, nevertheless this book still manages to be informative. Basically cribbed entirely from Joseph Campbell's <u>Hero with a Thousand Faces</u>, this book parcels out the jargon of archetypes into easy-to-swallow tablets. It is ultimately useful on the most basic levels in creating story and character. I'd like to see the next edition better structured and written for adults... but I can't deny the value of what Vogler teaches. Beginners: You will outgrow this book quickly but that doesn't mean it isn't useful.
Rating:
Summary: Keeping "Writer's Journey" in context
Review: While most of the kind things people say about Writer's Journey are no doubt substantially true, I would inject a few notes of context into this flood of enthusiasm: If you apply the Hero's Journey literally in constructing a story, you end up with a melodrama or a fairy tale -- a story for children, basically. It will be filled with superstition and magic and many, many friends and foes of the hero who pop up more or less mechanically and act without apparent motive other than the structural requirement that the hero be assisted or opposed at various points in the narrative. While this kind of unsophisticated melodramatic structure is probably necessary to reach audiences of the scale that see "Star Wars" or "Titanic," it is just not everyone's cup of tea. Humanity has progressed in countless areas since the Hero's Journey structure emerged 3,000 or so years ago. Science, music, politics, technology and art are all very different now from what they were like in Homer's day. In theory, then, literature might progress also and audiences might be ready for new techniques that Homer never tried. I know I am. I was bored to the point of nearly falling asleep by the Star Wars movies -- even the first one -- and I never got around to seeing Titanic. Nothing that I heard about it made it seem the least interesting. Another point to bear in mind is that Campbell and Vogler may be guilty of over-interpretation when they claim the basic story structure of the Hero's Journey is a reflection of innate and immutable needs of the human psyche. It seems to me much of it has more to do with the storyteller's needs than the audience's psyche. By that, I mean that a good part of the Hero's Journey structure simply reflects the component parts without which a story is unimaginable -- about on the same level of inevitability as saying that, if you want to build a car, in any culture, you're probably going to end up with something that has wheels and a motor, at a minimum. Suppose you knew nothing of the Hero's Journey theory, and you set out in blissful ignorance to devise a few basic ground rules to create something resembling a story. Well, you've got to have conflict of some sort, or what's the point? And you really need human actors (even if they are disguised as space aliens or dragons or lawyers) in your story if it's to interest human readers. How do humans come into conflict? Opposing agendas, basically. So you take one guy with an agenda and call him the protagonist. Take another guy with the opposite agenda and call him the antagonist. Now you've got conflict. OK, fire the starting pistol. Your guys come into conflict and one of them wins in the first chapter. Story over and everybody's happy, right? Of course not. Too short, too cut-and-dried, to be very interesting. So let's throw in a few ups and downs, some doubt and uncertainty, some advances and retreats, to put some meat on the bones. Surely, most of us would call that a story: human actors, conflicting agendas, ups and downs. Certainly, anything less wouldn't be. Obviously, you could call your guys the Hero and the Shadow; the conflicting agendas the Journey; the bit players Allies and Shape shifters and Threshold Guardians; and the ups and downs you could call Ordeals. And then you'd have the substance of the Hero's Journey, though in less detail than Vogler presents in his book. All that said, however, even I think the Writer's Journey is worth reading, for the following reasons: 1. It is the shortest, most coherent presentation of a unified theory of story that I know of. Maybe it's not the only theory of story, or the best, but it is a strong one, worth considering. 2. It does drive home the useful point that every major character in a story, as well as the larger minor characters, should have his/her own story, arc or journey (call it what you like). 3. While it is true that too-literal application of the Hero's Journey structure will give you a fairy tale or a fairly stupid melodrama, it's also true - as Vogler notes - that you can modify the elements, dispense with the magic, and do other things that make the theory useable for more modern or literary stories than Star Wars or Titanic. To my mind, Vogler spends too little time on this subject -- a way of adapting the hero's journey to modern literature. 4. If you aspire to be a screenwriter, none of my quibbles matter. The Hero's Journey seems to be the sole context and vocabulary in which people in the movie business discuss stories, so you have to read the book and learn the lingo if you want to talk to them. One final note of skepticism before I go: Vogler claims to have analyzed something like 10,000 movie scripts. Let's do some math. Suppose it takes him a day to analyze a script. (Sounds fast to me, but maybe he's a genius.) Suppose he does this five days a week, 50 weeks a year. That's 250 scripts a year, which means it would take 40 years to do 10,000 scripts. Plus, of course, he somehow has had time to write two editions of The Writer's Journey. Somehow, I doubt it. Maybe in the next edition of WJ, he'll explain his own Script Analyst's Journey.
Rating:
Summary: Consistently mentioned and recommended
Review: As a consultant and teacher to writers on marketing and selling their screenplays and books, I encounter both would-be writers and would-be story-analysts all over the country. When the discussion turns to what clients and students have read, The Writer's Journey always comes up, though it is usually just called "Vogler." When I ask students to make reading recommendations to one another, half say "Vogler" and half scribble "Vogler" in their notes. His work is accessible, incisive, universal, and useful to writers at all levels.
Rating:
Summary: Provides a universal structure for stories
Review: After reading this book you will be able to analyze any movie or story by identifying character types and plot structure from this book. It is fun to perceive the underlying structure of stories in this way. This is more formulaic than anything Joseph Campbell ever wrote. It works especially well for the original Star Wars movie.
| 
