Friday 4 November 2016

The 12 stages of the Hero's Journey – Are they real? – David Thorpe

This month I thought I would publish the slides from a presentation I gave this week at my writing course.

I wanted to delve deeply into the idea of plot and structure and then test the popular technique writers are taught that quest, discovery or journey type stories all have 12 stages. I did this by analysing two recent films and book that are very different indeed: The Girl On A Train and Doctor Strange. If you haven't seen these: spoiler alert! Don't read the penultimate two slides!

















[David Thorpe is the writer of Marvel's Captain Britain, the sci-fi YA novels HybridsDoc Chaos: The Chernobyl Effect and the cli-fi fantasy Stormteller.]
My (12-stage, of course!) writing course can also be taken online. Contact me if interested.

1 comment:

Penny Dolan said...

Thanks for posting all these notes, David, and sharing aspects of your writing course with us. I hadn't seen that "antithesis" diagram before - although I recognise what it is saying - and the idea offers a useful way of looking at the whole set of one's characters.