Back to The Original Purpose

The blog purports to be about writing, but I haven’t posted anything about that craft/art in some time. It’s time to get back to it.

A couple of years ago I attended the writer’s conference, in Nashville, TN, called Killer Nashville. I met several nice people and talked with three or four literary agents.  The featured speaker was the well-known novelist, Jeffery Deaver, who described his approach to writing—extensive outlining.

A speaker whose name I cannot remember introduced us to Christopher Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey.  That book explores the similarity of narrative patterns in fiction. It owes much of its background to the works of Joseph Campbell in The Hero With A Thousand Faces  These patterns, or archetypes,  exist in stories as dramatically different as Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz.

I decided to create my own story, using the the elements described by Vogler.  In…