This week, Fable and the Verbivore follow up our Star Wars two-part episodes with a look at the Hero’s Journey and the impact it has on past and present story structure.

George Lucas has said several times in interviews that without having read Joseph Campbell’s book A Hero with a Thousand Faces (basically a meta analysis of myths across the globe) he’d still be writing Star Wars. We can relate to the feeling that finding a structure that works for your given story can be like finding the missing piece to a puzzle.

Throughout our conversation, we dig into the contributions of Joseph Cambell, Christopher Vogler, and Blake Snyder’s to the Hero’s Journey story structure and how it has impacted many areas of storytelling from writing fiction, crafting TV series arcs, and screenwriting movie scripts. As part of this, we also explore some of the downside of having so many stories use similar general structures.

We also loosely contrast the more predominate Hero’s or Heroic Journey structure with the less widely used Heroine’s Journey story form(s) - with the intention that we’ll revisit this more rare story structure alternative in a future episode.

We hope you enjoy this episode. Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore