204 | The Hero's Journey ft. Christopher Vogler

Though Chris Vogler is generally credited with introducing the FRAMEWORK of The Hero's Journey into modern Hollywood discourse, it almost didn't happen. When someone else plagiarized his memo and trafficked it to Jeffrey Katzenberg trying to take credit for it, Chris faced a crossroads. Find out HOW he managed that, and became an essential creative pillar behind the development of THE LION KING

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Lorien: Hey everyone, welcome back to The Screenwriting Life. I'm Lorien McKenna.

Jeff: And I'm Jeff Graham, a. k. a. Producer Jeff.

Lorien: Unfortunately Meg can't join us this week, but we are really excited to welcome legendary development and Hollywood story analyst Chris Vogler, author of The Writer's Journey, a book I love and I used to teach.

Chris is a development executive, story analyst, and screenwriter who has worked for Disney Studios, Fox 2000 Pictures, and Warner Brothers, in addition to contributing story material to the Disney animated feature The Lion King. Chris's book, The Writer's Journey, Mythic Structure for Writers, is a widely celebrated screenwriting theory book focused on classic storytelling models that date back to ancient myths and how those models feature prominently even in modern storytelling.

Welcome to the show, Chris. We're really excited to have you.

Christopher: Well, thank you both. This is terrific, and it's right on theme for me because the title of my best known book is The Writer's Journey. And so I wanted to describe the typical dramatic story of the hero on a journey, but also the life of the writer.

And I've always been interested in that because they mirror each other. What goes on in the drama goes on in the dramatic, very dramatic sometimes, life of the writer. And I, I have, have hoped that my work has, has given some guidelines through that adventure of writing. And I, I have found these ideas useful for me in my own writing life.

Lorien: Awesome. Well, so this applies, so before we get into the interview, we're going to do Adventures in Screenwriting, where we talk about our weeks. And Chris, you have agreed to do this with us, and I'll go first as always. And so what you just said so mirrors what I'm going on, what's going on with me right now is that I am very stuck in Act One, in my life and my process, which is then being reflected in my writing, right?

So everything is fine. I don't have a problem. I'll keep doing exactly what I'm doing. Except there is a very obvious problem, and even though I know how to solve it, I'm just not doing it because of fear of success or fear of failure, I don't even know, but it's definitely the fear of the unknown.

And I really don't want to be a reluctant hero but here I am, stuck in Act One. So, because of my resistance to action in my life, I'm noticing the same resistance in my writing, so I like, I can't get out of Act 1 and into Act 2, like, I'm not being the narrative driver in my own story, and so it's hard for me to connect to my characters actually making active choices and getting into Act 2, to like, crashing that threshold, and so I am... it's awful.

Like, I can't, I don't have a plan, or goal, or plot two , so neither do my characters, and I feel very flaffily, and like, at loose ends. And so, the other piece that I'm struggling with this week is that this fear is stopping me in other ways, in that I'm... I realize I'm giving up. Power, my power to forces outside myself in terms of defining me and my life.

So, I have been in development on a TV animation project for a couple of years. And we are finally setting up pitches, right? I had pitches set up right before the strike, but had to pull them. So now it's a year later and I'm, and we're, the industry supposedly is hearing pitches again. So we're setting up pitches and I realized that I'm waiting for the outcome of that to determine who I am and what I am.

Like I'm attached to the project, but I'm way too attached to the outcome in terms of what happens next in my life. And I don't have any control over other people's decisions on that project. I love it. I hope I find a buyer who loves it too. But the reality of this career is that I can't be attached to the outcome, right?

I could have spent the last two plus years on this project. No one wants to buy it. And then it just doesn't exist. And that's heartbreaking. And I think that is the big fear that's holding me back. Right? I so want this show to go. So there's a, a weird fear thing going on. Sorry, I just got really emotional about this project.

I love it so much and I'm really sad that it might die. But I, this is what I'm struggling with, right? Like I get stuck in that vortex of like, what if it doesn't go? What if it doesn't go? Who am I? What have I been spending the last two years working on? So, I did what I do when I'm feeling very lonely and confused instead of dwelling on all that, I lean into my superpowers.

I pull together a group of people who are in animation and are also trying to figure out what the fuck is going on in the animation TV industry right now to talk and connect and I cleaned my desk and I made a writing schedule and I reminded myself that I am a great writer and that things usually work out for me and I also have to make this big choice I have that I'm afraid of, and I have to fling myself off of the cliff into act two. Because I have to be the driver of my own narrative, and I can't keep giving up control. I had a big week. I had a very dramatic week, and I feel very disorganized about it, and overwhelmed. I've been very stuck for a while, and I'm very scared this week about moving out of this stasis but I have to, because I'm rewriting a feature to direct it, and I'm pitching a feature, and if I cannot fucking figure out act two in these things, then nothing will happen.

And so I have to figure out act two in my own life, which is uncomfortable. Chris, how was your week?

Christopher: Well, this is quite amazing because I didn't expect it to be quite so nakedly confessional.

Jeff: Welcome to the show, Chris. Welcome to the show.

Christopher: This is reminding me of a poster which has a man exposing himself with his coat open and it's exposed yourself to art.

And yeah.

Lorien: Yeah. I'm not going to do that, but yes, I, but I have a, I have a habit of oversharing on the show. I don't know if it's oversharing. Telling the truth, the truth teller, how it works.

Christopher: I don't think you can. This is the forum for it. I'll just throw back to you something. I'm operating these days, in a very intuitive way, which is that I will listen to someone's situation, such as you're describing, and then I just am attentive to what comes up on my screen in response.

And what I got was a very, very strong image of for you of grapnel. You know what a grapnel is? This is a thing that's like, an arrowhead, but you shoot it into the enemy's ship and it sneers in the sail.

Lorien: Yes . I just read a book about pirates. So, yes. Yes.

Christopher: And it's got, yeah, so, or they swing it around their head and then they fling it and it's got hooks on it and it's attached to a rope and then you haul them, those two ships together and you have your boarding party and so forth.

And I think that's what you need is you, you need to get out your catapults and fire off. Grappling hook into the future. So some fearless thing and you're doing a lot of right stuff by my standard remedies for situations like this, like cleaning your desk. That's so important. And so, uh, potential to make, breakthroughs , because the desk represents your psychological state.

And so it will become, because you're interested in many things, it will become cluttered with, all these things and every one of those things is a vibrating entity that's going, pay attention to me, look at me, this pencil, this cup, this note, this book, and so forth, they're all screaming at you, look at me.

So from time to time, you just sweep all that aside and try to get back to the bare marble altar and then put on it one thing that represents the question at hand for you. Or that you think maybe in this case, sums up, okay, I know where I am now, but there's this other place I want to go to the next quarter, the next movement, the next year, the next breath.

So pick some object and put that on the altar and just contemplate that for a while.

Lorien: That's good advice. I find with my ADHD, it's really hard, right? Because I have a bunch of stuff all over my desk that isn't, that even though it's screaming for my attention, I just glaze over it and then all of a sudden it's like piled high, full of nonsense.

So I have to sweep it all off and be very intentional about what I have on my, on my desk. You're right.

Christopher: Yeah, yeah, because that pile of stuff will accumulate until a certain point of chaos is reached, and then it topples over and you get messes, and you break things, and you lose important things in the shuffle of all that, so from time to time, you've got to sweep the temple and just clear it down to, to one or two things.

That's it.

Lorien: I love the idea that it's an altar in a temple and that I'm engaging with some sacred part of myself that, and that's the part that I'm having trouble connecting with, I think, right? That, that the, that, that it is something special. Right. I got very collapsed into this idea of like, it's work, right?

It's work. This is my career instead of, and so I'm very disconnected from the like creative dreamer play part, right? It's like the head body connection has been severed in some way. And so I like the idea of, and also, I I broke my foot a couple months ago and so I had to move my whole office upstairs so I didn't have to go to up and down stairs and now I'm back downstairs where I actually do my actual work so it was a very uncomfortable, very strange time for me to be like so physically limited.

But now I'm like back in my office and I'm walking in shoes again. And I feel like, okay, now I'm back in control and I can make better choices or make any choices really. Like I'm walking in my shoes again, instead of like scootering around on that dumb scooter with my boot on my big dumb boo. So, but that piece of it has been really interesting for me as well.

Noticing how once my body collapsed, I let everything else fall apart as well, which is not a great habit. I'm realizing not a great like, "Oh, I'm done". But the stepping into the alter cleaning off that desk. I like that. It makes you very important.

Christopher: Yeah, there's, there's a, well you are, and, and there's a couple of things of, of what you said.

You touched on the idea of who am I? And that's one I've been chewing on a lot at at my age. And looking back. On my career and the things I tried to do. It's easy to lose sight of who you are, and that keeps changing. So there's that. But I think this divine thing, this sacred thing is also fresh for me because what I'm working on right now is a new set of ideas that have to do with the way people in the ancient world, the Greeks and Romans, basically the Greeks looked at character.

I'm interested in that right now. I, most of my career was about structure. Now I'm trying to focus more on character. And they assigned responsibility for different characteristics to different gods and goddesses. So there was a goddess of victory, Nike, and there was a goddess of excellence called Arete, and there was a god of the struggle, Agon, and Agon is the one that I'm finding really useful. It's embedded in the writing words antagonist and protagonist of the protagonist is the first one in the contest and Agon means basically the contest of the struggle something like that, but it's such a wonderful thing, and they created a God to represent that who was this handsome athlete, naked athlete doing discus, or jumping with weights in his hands.

So he would jump a little further. And they, they said athletic contests are kind of models for your character for building your character. And as a writer, everybody's got a struggle and some things are, immediate short term struggles of like how do I convince this producer and how do I get over this, little hang up on act three, but others are lifelong struggles and just that are part of your nature, for instance for me.

I'm a great starter and I'm a terrible finisher. I love to start new things and then I get bored and I jumped to something else and I don't have great follow through. And it's wonderful. The few times I did follow through on something had great rewards for it. But that's just my thing that I'm always going to have to deal with.

So it sounds like you're, you're not having a great big existential one. But maybe just a temporary one that Agon or struggled about who you are and moving on to another phase with it.

Lorien: Yeah, I think that's exactly it. And it's scary, right? It's, I, I, I, I love the idea of trying to figure out where I am in certain things in my life.

Like, is this Act Three? Am I finally in Act Three? Or am I at the midpoint? And I feel very much in Act One right now. Very much like, I gotta get into Act Two. I gotta figure out what the plot is.

Christopher: Well, that's good. See, that anxiety is good. It's there embedded in the hero's journey structure that there is a definite signal that is sent to the audience in Act One someplace.

Hey kids, this is scary. This could get you, this could, if you've identified with this hero, What's happening to her is happening to you and she could die, and she could fail and she could be lonely. She could be miserable. All, all these fears arise.

Lorien: The fear of death is real in terms of not, not for me actual physical death, but like the death of moving away from where I find safety or like false sense of security into this new adventure. When I became a mother, right. The, my old self. died in a way, right? This is a whole new experience for me.

Like everything changed, my brain, my priorities, right? And it was terrifying, totally terrifying. Amazing. But and no going back, right? Obviously. But it does feel like death of the old self moving from act one into act two, what you, and it's a really powerful way to look at act one, right? In terms of as we're moving through the story.

Can you... that's something that comes up in the writer's journey, right? The idea of death, or dying, or confronting death of self.

Christopher: Well, it's, it's, it was there, when I was formulating the ideas at some of that, I was at Disney when they were trying to adapt fairy tales and we kept running into death at the beginning of the fairy tale that the mother would die or the father would die, or some member of the family would die.

And it, it, it, it stopped us for a while. And then we realized, no, this is like in the Lion King, or Bambi . where that death gives some dignity and power to the story. And so we shouldn't run away from that. And it's true. I, I, I laugh about this. There's a relationship between healthy change, and death because as you say, every choice you make means the death of the other choices that you couldn't make, or didn't make.

So the funny example was when I was getting ready for my wedding, I said to my bride to be, We have a couple of weeks before the wedding, so maybe we can get some music and a harper or something to play some harp music for the funeral. And then we can have a wonderful thing for our guests. And my wife said, wait a minute, what did you just say?

And I said, Oh, for the wedding. And she said, no, you said funeral. You're thinking of this as the death of your bachelorhood. And I said, you're right. And she, gave me a hard time, but then she made the same mistake a couple of days later. So for both of us, it was the end of something.

And the beginning of something else. But here's the deal. You can't have the something else until you endure or accept the let's call it death, or end of a, a phase. That's all. Yeah.

Lorien: Yeah. And I think that's what's happening is that I am preparing myself to mourn for the thing that I am letting go of.

And, grief is hard. Even though I, it's like I really do. There it will be a death of one part of me. to move into to make this other choice. And it's it's hard. I don't want to feel more grief. Yuck. But, in terms of but I feel it in my body and that is something that I really want to talk about with you.

In the introduction of your book, I love the way your book is organized, by the way, the whole practical guide at the beginning and then the mapping and then the journey of itself. But in the introduction, you started out by saying all stories consist of a few common structural elements found universally in myths, fairy tales, dreams, and movies.

For me, this means that like, the story is in us, innately. Like in the culture that we live in and, and the collective memories that we all share going back to like ancient Greeks and theater. And it means like in practicality As I'm writing, I can feel like something isn't working. Like I can feel it physically.

And I don't always know how to fix it, but I can feel that bump and it's being aware of that. It is that what you were talking about with that quote? Like that it is. That is in us. Or is there something else going on with with what that means for you?

Christopher: Well, I just go one step more that I feel and I've learned to tune myself to pay attention to those feelings of anxiety or discomfort or just, this isn't working.

This stinks, but I'm drawn more by the other side of that, which is this wonderful sensation when things do fall into place and when somebody says the right thing in the meeting, and when you voice in the meeting, the right idea. There is some kind of physical sensation that goes through your body. A shiver down the back something like goose bumps on your arms.

I get something that's like a rattling that goes down my spinal column. That is like, this thing they call a rainstick where they've hollowed out a piece of wood. And they've got peas, or dried peas, or beans or something in there. And when you turn it, it goes, it sounds like water rushing and rainfall.

So I get that down my spine ,and it tells me for sure. That was a good idea. That that's a keeper. Remember that, and it happened when we were doing the Lion King. It was so clear that I had voiced something that just had to be in the movie and it was about the lifting up the baby at the very beginning in the circle of life, and they had it all animated.

It was totally done in color and fully realized, but they didn't have the shaft of light coming out of the cloud at the climax of the music when the baboon shaman holds up the baby lion. And I said, I, I just, I don't know why, but I feel you got to have that shaft of light. And they slapped themselves in the forehead, the producers and said damn it. He's right. That's going to cost us, but...

Lorien: I was just going to say that sounds like an expensive fix to me.

Christopher: It was, it was a very expensive fix, but all the animators shuddered. You , you could see this physical sensation run through the room and they all took their pencils and started drawing that because they draw constantly.

They're, they're drawing their own foot or, the head of the person in front of them. And it just instantly transmitted. So I knew that was a golden thought. So those things keep me going. That's what I also feel in the movies. When you go to a movie and maybe something in fantasy or science fiction or your own life is suddenly there, like at the end of Saving Private Ryan.

Somehow there's a scene where the, one of the guys from the World War II goes to the cemetery to honor all those who didn't make it. And he, he's the one guy who made it. And somehow Steven Spielberg put my father up there on that screen, that the actor playing them, that this character embodied my father.

And just. destroyed me and, and gave me this wonderful sensation. So, this is why I, I go to the movies is to get this and why I'm in the business is to, hope to find in every project, one or two of those sparkly things. That makes it better or, or, or will, I know it's going to go all the way through the process and land in the audience's bodies.

Lorien: Yes.

Christopher: And that's thrilling.

Lorien: I so want to talk about this. So one of the things we talk about on the show, or that I've been really, when I work with writers, I've been really talking to them about like, when you finish a version of your, when you finish a draft, print it out and look for what you love.

Don't worry about what's broken or what you need to fix, like circle what you need to love and you'll see patterns in that, right? Like, oh, I love all this stuff, but I don't know, I don't love anything about the main character relationship. Okay. Well then that's something to look at, right? In the same way that we watch movies and TV, our story brains are cranking.

Oh, that doesn't work. Where are we? Right? What advice do you have? Because I do it, right? It's so hard not to be trying to track I don't even have to try, right? I'm tracking structure. I'm, oh, that didn't work. It's the cynical part of my brain. How can I look at things I'm watching and experiencing in that same way?

What do I love, right? How am I yearning to be moved? This was that Pixar too, right? In the story room, like, we were, they were always trying to figure out, like, What is working? What do I love? What am I not willing to let go of? Right? And, and trying to make it work. How do you switch out of that like, cynical, I'm so smart, I know how to fix this brain, or I know it's not working brain, into, here's what I love about it.

Like, you're talking about the rain stick moment. Like, I, I want that.

Christopher: Yeah, I, I've been watching documentaries about Paul Simon and Steve Martin, and how they go about things, and you have choices. as an artist, how, how you're going to approach the work. And one thing that impressed me from Paul Simon was that he treats it this way.

I know that's working. All right. That's musical. That's nice. Okay, fine. That's like off the table. And now I want to really focus on that thing that doesn't work that is bugging me. So that's one way to do it. But I think, you're onto something that there might be another way where you just follow what works and you keep trying to expand that, the influence of that.

And that was more of the way I worked in advising and consulting I thought of myself as a yes man in this particular way, which is that people would throw out ideas. And that's a bad idea. And that's a bad idea. And I wouldn't say that stinks. That's a bad idea. Other people did that, but I didn't say anything until somebody said something that was right and that gave me this rain stick feeling and then I'd say yes. And I'd say yes, yes, yes. So that's what I meant by being a yes man is I wanted to, if I didn't have an idea myself like that, I wanted to pay attention until one came along and then grab it and say, okay, hey, hey, hey, that really is on the spine.

That supports the big idea that expands the good thing. We got going.

Lorien: That's awesome. Yeah, I think that happens in the TV room, right? It's just, yeah, it's harder. It's like you're in the TV room. The showrunners going. They're like, yes, you get the ideas cranking. Everyone gets that feeling. You can see when it's coming up.

You can see when it's coming. You can feel it. It's harder when you're alone. Writing a pilot or writing a feature to trust yourself that you're on to something. And I know that's around practice and dedication, but it's really hard to get to that point where you feel like, you know, well, isolation is hard.

Christopher: Yeah, yeah, that it is hard. And the one way I have of dealing with this and your question to about the sort of critical snotty side that shoots everything down and the the other side that's like, Oh, we this is wonderful. Is is to address them as entities that are part of you, but you can talk to them and you can say on to the editorial side.

Listen, sweetheart. I know you're a tough broad, but hey, just go have a cigarette or something. And we're going to go be creative and you go off into fairyland for a while and, and, and look for the fairy dust and then you can come back and you can, tear it up and red pencil it all you want. So let them take turns.

And, and I have subdivided my writing personality that way.

Lorien: Right.

Christopher: That at times I'll just say. Look, today, we're freewheeling, and I don't care, and then we'll come back and we'll say why that stinks, but for now, let's just let it rip.

Lorien: Yeah, we talk a lot about that on the show as well. Like, you have to be able to separate the dreamer, the creative, the like, just running wild, to the editor and I've realized that in my process, it's so much safer and easier to rip stuff apart, to be mean, right?

It's like protecting myself, but it also holds me back, right? Which is why I'm trying so hard to I love that piece of it instead of here's what's not working in my own work and other people's works. I make myself sound like a total asshole when I'm talking like that, but when I'm watching a TV show or a movie I'm looking for what's not working.

And I'm trying to shift that so that I can understand what is working more viscerally so I can trust that in my own writing. Because looking for what doesn't work isn't helping me as a writer.

Christopher: Yeah, I, as I watch shows now I guess my orientation is that I'm cheering for them. It's like, please, you gave me something nice, a character or a scene that was very promising.

I'm liking that. Now, don't mess it up. Right. So there's where the critical side comes in. And there is this real sense of disappointment. They, somebody chickened out, somebody didn't follow through on the idea, or they didn't realize the goal that they had in that character, or something like that.

And but it's always with a kind of a coaching element to it. If I could just get them.

Lorien: No, I, I, I think that's such a good perspective is that we're rooting, right? Because we talk about an act when we want to create a character who's rootable, we're rooting for them, not likeability, right? And in the same way, we need to be rooting for ourselves, we need to be rooting for our characters, and we have to train ourselves then to be rooting for the stuff that we are watching.

Yes, and

Christopher: I really felt something in my heart when you were talking about, your affection for your projects and your fear that they will die and that nothing will come of them. And I can tell you that's a lifelong experience.

Lorien: Yeah, I have many projects scattered around Hollywood that are just, in turnaround that will never turn back around.

That they, they, these characters are created, these worlds, and it's, It's hard, but that's part of the, that's why I think it's part of the industry. Like, I cannot be that attached to the outcome. Yeah. Like I created it. I love it. I want to find someone else who loves it, but I'm not gonna die if it doesn't happen.

Right.

Christopher: Yeah, yeah. I, I think about the great unmade movies. There's, there's quite a stack of those. Yeah. Stanley Kubrick was supposed to make his version of Napoleon and there's a, a gigantic book about all of the notes and everything assembled for that, and it would've been amazing.

He just couldn't get it together because of timing. There was some other Waterloo movie with Rod Steiger that came out and wasn't that popular and it just killed his project. So, you have to take your satisfactions where you can. And here's another thing about that, is that we don't know as writers how our writing is going to travel and who's going to read it and how it's going to influence them.

There was many a time as a studio reader reading eight or 10 scripts a week where I read a script and I say, I know this is never going anywhere. This was a labor of love for somebody. I'm going to give it its due respect, but it's not going to get made. However, there was one line in there that I needed to hear at that exact moment in my life, and it's burned in my memory, and I thank that writer.

And I wish, that was one big frustration. I wish I could go to the writer and say, Listen, you, you're, you're, you're not going anywhere with this script, but you did something for me and thank you so I just issued that as a blanket. Thanks to the many people...

Lorien: everyone in the audience.

Here's what I'm going to say, everyone who's listening. You have written something at some point in your life that has impacted someone else.

Christopher: Yes.

Lorien: By writing it. By putting it out there and it, it could be anything, right? A poem, an email you wrote, like a script that something you've written has touched someone else, whether you know it or not.

So just, that's a good thing to remember, right? We have power in our writing. I'm going to hold on to that all day. I'm going to squeeze it.

Christopher: Good. Good.

Lorien: Okay. I want to talk about your book, The Writer's Journey, and I want to talk about this memo that you wrote that was the genesis for the book. It's such an interesting story to me.

So I would like to hear you tell it.

Christopher: Okay. Well, I, I create this legend of myself that I'm a farm boy from Missouri and, that's partly true, but anyway I just had the feeling watching films as a kid, even there must be a book. There must be a manuscript, a scroll or something that tells you how it all works and why it's so wonderful and compelling.

And so I was looking for that. And I went through the Air Force making documentaries for the space program. And then I got into film school and while I was in school looked around and there weren't any screenwriting books except La jos Egri , The Art of Dramatic Writing.

Lorien: We talked about this before we started recording, right?

How important that book was to me as a playwright, and as a playwriting professor. That book and your book were what grounded me in my, how I understood terms, how I understood structure, and character, right? The art of dramatic writing for me was character, character. So, yes, I love that book.

Christopher: Yeah, I, I was so grateful there was that, although it wasn't really a screenwriting book, there weren't any screenwriting books. Imagine that, a world with no screenwriting books instead of 5, 000. But yeah, I was so grateful because he cracked open this ancient rusted treasure chest and out of it came these ideas and principles about, look, this is what you're trying to do.

You're trying to get somebody to a decision point in their life. And if they make a good choice, we're happy and it's a happy ending. And if they make a bad choice, it's a tragedy. And, just real simple fundamental. Rocks. Subtle, but real basic stuff. And so there wasn't anything for screenwriting.

So I'm looking, looking, and then I said something in a class about some mythic symbol I thought I saw in a film and the teacher turned me on to the hero with a thousand faces. So that happened to coincide with the first week that Star Wars came out, the original Star Wars. So I read Campbell and then I went to see that movie and bang, all that kind of exploded.

Lorien: Someone else had read Campbell as well, apparently.

Christopher: Yes, yes, George Lucas admitted later that he probably wouldn't have written the Star Wars except for reading Campbell . So I went to Hollywood. I took one class in story analysis, how to write a report, and I turned that into a 25 year career.

Reading scripts and consulting for the studios, but I was always working on this idea. Okay. What is the algorithm we would say now what is what is the basic tick tock or heartbeat of this dramatic thing that dramatic experience. And found it in Campbell and went through a labor while I was working at Disney of translating it into movie language because Campbell didn't think about films very much.

So I, I did that and at Disney at that time, there was a culture of writing memos and there was a famous memo that Jeff Katzenberg wrote, and he was a great teacher of memo writing and note writing. For executives, or anybody who has to take notes. Or give notes. Katzenberg was the master.

He had wonderful techniques and had a great modesty about how he gave notes in, in a form that was like, I, I, I, I know you guys know better than me. I'm not the writer, better, he would say, and he said, but here's a little problem in this, in the script. I think this needs to be tuned up somehow, and here's five dumb ways you can fix it.

These are obvious. These are dumb. Don't do any of those. But I'm just pointing out, you've got a problem. You got to solve it. You're the writers figure it out. So I loved his way. So I wrote it in his style. And then a few people saw it. I passed it around. Some people thought, what is this, a novel, the hero with a thousand faces?

Do you want to adapt it into a screenplay? Or what, what are you trying to do here? And I said, no, I, I just think this is useful. And so I put it in this memo form. And then my little bit of spycraft was that I left a copy of it on the Xerox machine. How in the old days. People would sometimes in a rush, they would make copies and they'd leave the original on the glass and I used to look for that.

I'd go by the Xerox machine and it was like intelligence gathering. Sometimes I found very interesting memos that I wasn't supposed to see on that glass. So I left my memo. On the glass thinking, well, maybe this will get into the viral loop of the studio. And that's exactly what happened. Some executive...

Lorien: early ways of going viral, going viral.

Christopher: It was before there was any such a thing. This is in the days of Xerox machines and fax machines and ancient technology. We even had carbon paper. It was that far back.

Lorien: Give me a grasp, man. Nothing like a good ...

Christopher: right.

Lorien: Yeah.

Christopher: So, by those antique means the thing started passing around and somebody plagiarized it and executive at Disney tore the cover off, put his name on it and submitted it to Jeffrey Katzenberg and Katzenberg went nuts and said, this is what we want.

This is exactly the answer to our story problems, especially in animation. So, thank you very much, Mr. Executive. And within five minutes after that meeting, my spies in the room reported to me, Hey, he stole your memo. And so I wrote, and this is way out of character for me to assert myself like this.

I wrote to Katzenberg and he responded immediately. He called me in a very brief terse, intense call. He said, I got it. Okay. I see you wrote the memo. Fine. Go to work with animation. That's where they need you. They're working on this thing about lions. Go over there. So, he paved the way for me.

And I went to animation thinking I'd have to sell them on the hero's journey idea, and I walked in the door and they had a cork board in the hallway. outlining the Lion King by the 12 stages of the hero's journey. So the memo had virally preceded me and did all the work for me, which is the kind of magic thing that is around this idea.

It has this independent power that if you just launch it and send it the stone skipping out over the water, it just takes off. And that's what happened. And the idea spread and it was I think simple enough and clear enough that it was transmittable and so it became part of the collective brain of Hollywood is the only way I can really see it. For good or bad.

Lorien: No, I think it's I think it's amazing. It gives us all a collective language, right? And something else you, you point out very quickly in your book is that it's a form, not a formula. Because for a lot of emerging writers, I will say that there is a resistance to the structure that we all recognize in our western culture, right?

What the, the Joseph Campbell, the, what you're talking about in your book, because it's too prescriptive, or it'd be like formulaic, but it, I don't, I disagree with that. It's a tool. Right, I think you agree with that as well that you bring your own magic to it and make it unique and special.

Christopher: Yes, it, partly I think it can shake people up because you're naming the unnameable, you're you're putting names and titles to things.

That for thousands of years, people have known who work in the arts and work as in theater making puppet shows or whatever they're doing. They, they knew these things, but it's breaking a taboo to write down the unwritten rules. So I did that and I'll pay the price for that. But I think you're right.

Lorien: What do you mean? Pay the price for that?

Christopher: Well in that you can be accused of being a popularizer and an oversimplifier and actually a cultural drag because you've reduced the thing that that's one of the accusations I have on me.

And Campbell had this too that he was reductionist, that he was taking something so wonderfully complex that only genius PhDs can understand it, but yeah, I and Campbell brought it down to a little more accessible popular level and the, the eggheads don't like that.

Jeff: We say, we say all the time on the show, Chris, that the goal of our show is to provide as many tools for our writers toolboxes as they want, as we can, and they pick what works for them.

So we are firmly on the side of whatever works,

Christopher: And here's the other thing, whatever works. Absolutely. Right. It might be on a given script or a given scene I'm working on. That today I am relying on what I know about ballet and it has nothing to do with the hero's journey directly. It might be there. You could probably find it, but no. It's about what I know about sailing a boat, or what I know about baseball or what I know about a family dynamics or, or something else.

So you, you, you have really a vast repertory of. Of metaphors of options for how you're going to do it. And I think that's part of the task for every creative person is that they take and gladly will gobble up something like the hero's journey or any other structural concepts or theories. And, and take the parts they like and, make that their own.

But then. They twist it and turn it for themselves that that it reflects their life and their thing. And this is the stage I'm in right now is enjoying how people will make it their own and apply it to their thing, whatever that it isn't a lot of it isn't about writing. A lot of it is about how to plan a trip for pre teen kids and how to get through the first year of nursing school and, so on.

People take these ideas and apply them way outside of the writing frame.

Lorien: Exactly. I, I agree. I, I wondering working backwards, right? What pitfalls do you see writers fall into when they're comparing their work against the hero's journey, or using the hero's journey to actually write, to, to structure something out?

Christopher: Well, I went, I went through it myself. I, I, when I came to it, I think I was operating at a very primitive, childish level that was influenced by Zorro and Superman more than anything else, and the old Batman comics. I had the idea that the hero was the hero and that it was a he and that he was good and that he, never shot anybody in the back and never drew first and was nice to women and so forth.

I had all of these kind of...

Lorien: Who is this guy? I want to meet him?

Christopher: It was kind of the, the old 1950s idea of heroism that it would be a savior and so forth. And that the villain would be very villainous and, obviously twirling a mustache and wearing a black hat. And so I had all of these cliches. And I think that's just a stage that you go through as you're bringing this stuff on an arc up through consciousness and then back down into unconsciousness again.

And that's one of the pitfalls is that when you become super conscious of it, the bones stick out and we can see, Oh, you just read Vogler's book. Okay. So you put in this and that, and people would even put the, the names of the parts into the script and say, okay, this is the call to adventure.

This isn't the refusal of the call. And they'd even put it in dialogue. So I, I, that's all.

Lorien: Wait, what, what do you mean wrong? What do you mean? Like, this is my inciting incident happening right now. Like literally in the, in the dialogue, the call to adventure.

Christopher: Yes, there can be. I've seen it where people become whimsically self aware about and it's like a meta thing where they want to plant knowledge of it.

I think you can find this In the Rick and Morty show, Rick and Morty has gone in for a whole line about Joseph Campbell. They made Joseph Campbell a character and the hero's journey is now part of their deconstruction of everything. They're so fascinated by the forms of storytelling that they they've actually incorporated some of this.

So I just think that as a stage, it's a stage where people become obvious. I was very unpopular in Hollywood for a time with executives because people started coming in and pitching by the hero's journey, and say this is my ordinary world and now my hero has this inciting incident and this is his refusal of the call, and they they pitch that way as if that would buy them a green light.

Lorien: Well, now the experience is you deliver a script and the executive will say to you, why isn't the inciting incident on page 10?

Christopher: Yeah. Well, that, that, that, that, that was happening back in the days, even before I opened my mouth at all with Sid Field, with his approach to three act structure. They did the same thing. They said it. Look, it says right here in the manual that there must be a turning point right here. Page 86. Where is it? You have it on 89. Why don't you move it back about three pages? And they really did that, took it literally, so don't do that.

Lorien: Yeah, don't do that. So, I have a personal, I want to get some advice from you. How the hell, so okay, I am struggling with this with myself, right? Stuck in Act 1. And I see a lot of writers do this as well, right? Act 1, 45 pages long. Act 1, Act 1 is so delicious. How do you get people out? How do you? What kind of advice do you have for a writer?

Get out of Act 1. One of the things I've done is just say, write Act 2. Don't worry about Act 1. Just dive in. Just put them in the upside down world and just go. We'll worry about setting it up later. I don't know how successful that is. What advice do you have?

Christopher: Well, I like that, and I think that maybe applies, you might have given yourself an answer to your current condition where you're a bit locked, and that was the grappling iron idea of, of firing something.

Lorien: I hate it when I do this on the show, I do this all the time. I figure out what my problem is, and then I figure out what my solution is, but I'm waiting for someone else to tell me the magic. Please, Chris Vogler, tell me the magic thing, and then what you're telling me back is, do the work. So fine, I'll go do the work.

Christopher: And listen to yourself, because you already said it. But I'll just give you a corporate metaphor that they threw at us at Disney. And this is something I enjoyed very much. working for almost all the studios. They all had a personality and they all had a body of corporate language and knowledge.

And one of the things they said at Disney was look, all of our scripts are coming in with a long first act. And this is the way to think about it. They said your, your script, your story is like an airplane getting ready to take off. So the first act is make the reservations, pack your bags, load up everything, gas up the plane, put on the seatbelts, express some fear with the voiceover that says in the unlikely event of a water landing, you throw a little fear in and call to adventure and then get the wheels up as fast as you can.

And he, the executive giving this said, what's happening in the scripts is. The plane is taxed. Thing along, but you're still throwing bags on you're still adding new characters. You're still giving me new information that you feel insecurely is necessary before I can really take off so the plane is bouncing along and now it's gone through the fence and it's in the suburban neighborhood, and it's crashed into a school in an orphanage at a hospital get the wheels up. So that was that was their way of expressing, it is the audience is quick now and you can jump, you can jump cut right into it And and they'll just play a couple of notes and they'll get it.

They know too .

Lorien: Yeah. No, I think that's it. Get the wheels up.

Jeff: And I find to Chris, what I love about that metaphor is you're talking about overpacking the plane with luggage. You don't need. I find sometimes my issues in act one or that I actually haven't packed the luggage I do need. I have this bag and I'm focusing on other bags, but ultimately I haven't done the work to pack the actual bag that the protagonist needs in the plane, if that makes sense.

So sometimes I think we're packing the plane. With luggage we don't need and we actually haven't focused on the luggage that really matters for our act too. That's another way I like this.

Christopher: Yeah, this is the problem is that you don't know which of those travel aids is going to be critical until you've gone through and then you realize, oh, the screwdriver for the eyeglasses.

Yeah. That's the one thing that I should have had with me because that is actually the right size to open the, secret box or whatever.

Lorien: So it is. It is, not just get the, it's start once the plane touches down, right? Like it's, write Act Two, right? The plane's going to land somewhere new and exciting.

Christopher: Yes.

Lorien: And then write that, and then you'll discover what you actually need to pack in Act One. Yes. In order to figure out how Act Three is going to turn out. That's it. You know what? Writing is so easy. We just figured it out. We cracked it. We're done. Everybody go write a feature. Ta da! Okay, I have a very important question for you now.

Why is what writers do important?

Christopher: Ah, why is it important? Well, from the very early days, I was asking myself, what is a story? And why do they have this cultural importance, which is obvious, huge, whether it's in the form of computer games that tell stories or, actual dramatic presentations.

It very, very big part of our culture, and the first thought many years ago was that they are, our stories are evolved survival mechanisms that we developmentally created a new layer of the brain at some point in evolution, if you believe in that. that allowed, that allowed for metaphorical thinking, for poetic thinking, for saying this is like that, or this person's life is like my life.

And that basically that's what's going on in just about every story. They're presenting you with a metaphor that you make into something about your life. And if you can't find your life in it somehow, if it doesn't reflect some problem or question, you have then you just check out and you, you don't watch it.

You aren't involved, but most stories have enough of a hook in them that you can find yourself, you can find your problem, or something similar to your problem. And that that is healing, that the stories are like storage devices for know how, for how to survive, how to handle the difficult things.

And they give us models and then we do this metaphoric act of comparison, like, okay, that's how she solved her problem. Is there something I can get out of this? That is there some little fragment, even if it's in a pop song about silly song about romance or something, I might take one little phrase out of that.

That's like, Hey, that's where I went wrong. Yep. Yep. That's that was my mistake. And I think I can fix that. So, we're looking for clues and stories are this repository that has allowed us to collect strategies for living, I, I talk about that, about the narrative strategies you need, how am I going to relate this story, but they're really talking about life.

Lorien: I think that's so interesting. I was thinking about while you were talking, like how certain stories can connect us to other people as well.

Christopher: Yeah.

Lorien: And. My husband and I years ago saw Jerry Maguire and got into a huge fight afterwards because he believed in the whole lightning strikes you, you fall in love thing.

And I believe in the more slow burn. You make a choice every day to be in love, but we almost broke up because of this movie and like one teeny part of it, and and then I heathers, which came out 35 years ago It's one of my favorite movies, but I have a whole core group of friends around that movie.

Like it bound us together at a very certain time in our life and how important certain stories are to me and to other people. And then when I hear certain people don't like a movie or something I love, I get a little bit suspicious. Like are you my people kind of thing? But it's just so interesting how you said they're healing, they're connective.

But so powerful how we, what we find in certain movies and how we watch them at different times in our lives too and see different things.

Christopher: Yes, that said about the fairy tales. One of the books that was widely read at Disney in the Lion King era was Bruno Bettelheim's book.

Lorien: I was just going to ask, was it Bettelheim?

Christopher: Yeah, right. So, yeah, one of the, the, the ideas in that book. Is that the fairy tales speak to us in a different voice at different times in our lives. So it means something when you're a little kid and you read about being in the woods with wolves and so forth, but it means something very different or can go on meaning something to you later on in life.

Yeah, I do love the shared aspect of stories that you can give a story as a gift to somebody and that that can be a connector is a wonderful thing. My mother and I before she passed away traded. She had me read Harry Potter, and I had her start on the Master and Commander books about the British Navy in the Napoleonic Wars.

So we had that wonderful correspondence and lovely with my dad too. There were things that he would he would ask me to read and, and then, then we had a relationship about it. So it, it was, it, it has that power too.

Lorien: That's lovely. Right. What advice do you have for writers? Working right now.

Christopher: Oh, working, working right now.

I, what comes into my head, the snapshot that comes into my head has to do with breathing. Because I, I think a lot of times when I'm stuck, the way out of it is to become a little more conscious of my breathing and my posture as I'm sitting if I'm blocked. Sometimes I it's I've slumped, and I'm not squared and my feet aren't square on the floor.

And I'm not really breathing much at all just this kind of panting where you're you're exhaling mostly, but not really taking in some deep breaths. So a few deep breaths gets you back to the screen of your unconscious. And I do a whole exercise. If I'm stuck on something I do maybe five or 10 deep breath cycles.

And imagine I'm on an elevator going down. And every time I go through a complete cycle, it's another floor. And I'm going down and down and down, maybe down 10 floors. And then the doors open, and I'm in an old 1950s MGM. Screening room with plush seats and I go and sit down and I say, roll them and whatever I'm supposed to see is on that screen and I prepared myself by the breathing and More generally about breathing.

This is a little secret. I learned in the editing room and a brief period about 4 and a half months when I worked on an independent feature, and I realized that what we were doing with the editing is something you can also do on the page, which is control the breathing of the audience or the reader. So by your cadences by your word choice by the shocking effect of the images.

by the white space on the sides of the page, you can control the breathing of the reader and get them turning that page, which is what you want. You want them to be whipping through those pages. When I read scripts for a living, sometimes I'd get a script and I, I just flipped through it and I go, Oh my God, there's 110 pages here, but it's going to be 400 pages of work to get through this because it was just so you could see it's so dense.

You don't even have to focus. You could just hold it across the room and you could tell that script is too dense. So, um,

Lorien: White space is an art form. White space, yeah. It is a necessary part of craft. You've got to learn it.

Christopher: Absolutely right. Yeah. This is what some great screenwriters do.

There's a whole, you could do a whole, blog just about format and how it looks on the page and all the different tricks people do but I like tricks and I like isolating things, just as in speech, I'm picking certain words and I'm punching them. And I, I think it's perfectly fine to do that on the page and to maybe just have a page with, some descriptions and movement and a little bit of dialogue and then bang, or wow, or, something isolated.

And surrounded by white space and, it, it makes a difference in the reading experience.

Lorien: I love the way you talk about breathing as the artist and as controlling the breathing of the reader, because that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to get someone to lose their breath. That's something so engaging happen that they change how they're breathing. It's so exciting or so terrifying on the page.

Christopher: Yeah, it was true in the editing room that we, we realized first, Oh, I, we learned the trick first to make them hold their breath. But then we learned the trick. Now signal them.

It's okay to let that breath out like, oh, that's over the fight's over. No, it's not. And then you gasp again.

Lorien: Well you see this a lot in horror right? Like the one that it's the fake, the fake out of the cat, right? Like, you're holding your breath. You're holding your breath. And then the cat jumps out of the cover and you're like, Oh, okay.

It's this they go. Okay. Ha ha ha. But then you're bracing yourself. Because you know in the rhythm of that story, right? So it's, it's that's horror for me. Such a great way to look at that.

Jeff: It's so interesting too, because we even use this language when we're giving notes. We'll say, you need to let this scene breathe.

We'll use that type of language if it's paced the wrong way, so. So smart, Chris. I just love thinking about this this way. Thank you.

Lorien: Yeah. So we're going to wrap up the show. We have three questions to ask you. We ask every guest the same three questions, but before that is what, what haven't I asked you that you want to share with our audience?

Christopher: Well, I would just say right now, what's top of mind for me is this business of the characters, the way the Greeks saw them. And I'm just finding so many wonderful correspondences and explanations as I research this, why things in the language of storytelling are as they are, why these words scene, actor, crisis, catharsis, all of those are Greek words, drama, it's all Greek words, but they all mean something.

And it's very, very specific. So, I'm, I'm enjoying that. And I'll give you one example. Looking at Nike victory, it turns out she had two brothers and a sister and each one represented a different aspect of victory qualities that you needed to get victory and one of them was a brother named Zelos.

And from that word we get. Zealous and jealous because you need to be zealous to get victory, but it can also make you jealous of the others and so that you're a poor loser and you're, you're not gracious when somebody else happens to win. So, that's the kind of thing that I'm unearthing here and really enjoy.

Lorien: I'm very excited to learn more about, I love Greek mythology and Roman mythology. I know they are quite similar, but I, I find all that very fascinating, very interesting. I'm excited to hear what you've come up with. Yeah, it's, it's just. You were talking about that. I was thinking about looking at characters, not just from their flaws.

So I have this whole theory about superpowers and super flaws and how focusing on a character's superpowers, what they're good at. Like the good part, like zealotry can be good, right? Commitment, super focused. But the opposite side of that is that passion and focus can turn into the darker side, right?

The jealousy. Are you noticing that in some of your work?

Christopher: I've noticed it more in the workplace. When I worked at the studios, it became very clear, as I studied the corporate structure and the individual constellations of executives in different departments, this principle came very clear. Every single person's best quality was also their worst quality.

So a certain boss might be loyal. Like I promote from within, I stick by my people, I defend them and so forth, but that has a downside. When you stick by people past their prime, past their when they screw up when they become a burden when they're just, filling space still being loyal to them isn't good.

So, yeah, that, that really came across. That whatever, whatever it is, your own best quality. I would say for me, I project a kind of generosity or kindness or something like that. But that can be a downfall for me, because it's easy to take advantage of me because of those things, because I'm an innocent still.

So, I think that is a really good thing to put to yourself when you're looking at your characters. What's what's their very best thing? And I bet you it's a key to where their downfall would be. Yeah,

Lorien: I'm trying this thing where I'm trying to be positive. I'm trying to be a realist instead of a cynic.

That's my thing. I can't go to optimism, but I can go to realism. I'm struggling with I'm in that place.

Christopher: Well, that's where you'd probably end up. Anyway, that's the way polarity works is you go from one extreme to the other, and then you end up in a realistic place in between.

Lorien: Yeah, so I'm trying to miss the I'm trying to miss the whole optimism part.

I don't know how I could do that. But it has been awesome having you on the show, but we're going to ask you the three questions now.

Jeff: Okay.

Lorien: So the first question is. What brings you joy in your work?

Christopher: What brings me joy in my work is matching up something that I've written to something that exists in the world.

Whether it's a historical character that I feel has been overlooked, that's a lot of what I like to play around with. I like it when I can unearth something and deliver something to people that that's there, latent, maybe or forgotten about. I, I like that. I, I get a lot of joy out of surprising people by stuff they, they, they maybe already know or they've forgotten about, but that I bring new life to it is, is great fun for me.

Lorien: Well, so far you've been doing that. For me, definitely. Padi, you want to ask the second question?

Jeff: Chris, what is it that pisses you off about writing or your work in general?

Christopher: Oh, about my work? Well, for me, just to be personal about it it's the the difficulty I find in finishing, which is a fear of commitment.

And it's related exactly to what we were talking about earlier. The closing off of options. I, I like to keep the options open. And so, it's really hard for me to pin down the script and say, this is it today. I'll have like a sidebars and I'll have a piece of dialogue that that I'm going to put that down at the bottom because I might want to bring that back in again, and that speech was so good.

I don't want to completely forget about that. So that's just a thing which does piss me off about myself in other people's writing, I would say. It's telling me stuff that I already know or, or that I can figure out on my own people, especially when starting out, will give you things like he looks out through the window, which is made of glass, with his eyes.

I've actually encountered that in someone's novel. Yeah.

Lorien: Well, this is lovely.

Christopher: Yeah. It was sweet, really, that he felt it necessary to tell me the man.

Lorien: Perhaps he was an alien. We don't know.

Jeff: That's amazing. Because I so relate to what you're talking about, about having to pin down your story and how that can be challenging. And if I may, we had a guest on the show, Ed Solomon, who, wrote the men in black movies and Bill and Ted's adventure.

And one thing he said on our show that has been so helpful to me is every day when he approaches his work, whether he's 10 drafts in or approaching the blank page. He says, What is it today? And what he says, it gives me so much peace because I don't need to worry about making some kind of death defying commitment to whatever the story is.

I can feel the freedom of just committing to something today and letting the script breathe as we talked about. So I just thought that was great. And every time we approach our work saying what is it today can bring a sense of peace and freedom around that. So some good advice from him.

Christopher: Yeah, yeah, there's a similar thing called the fool's mind in the tarot card deck they, they, they have numbers and the zero is the card of the fool and the fool's mind or the fool's condition is, hey man, I don't know anything.

And what I wrote yesterday, that's yesterday and today fresh blank canvas. And so, I'm just going to be open and and try to remember that. So you don't get so hung up.

Jeff: Yeah. I love that. So the final question we have for you, Chris is if you could go back in time and have a coffee with your younger self, what advice would you give to that Chris and why?

Christopher: Well, I, I would say work out a little bit more do maybe a few more sit ups and crunches because life is physically demanding and that that's just how it's worked out for me. I, I have a hard time, I think, balancing the writing life, which is basically sitting here. With all the other requirements of life, which means, moving and moving furniture and all the other things that are involved, changing tires and things like that.

So, what I mean by that to unpack that a little bit is I'd say to myself. You're going to do just fine, but that doesn't mean you're not going to have to work. And it's, it's parts of it are going to be very, very hard. And some of that's brain work. And some of that is physical. So, get yourself tuned up as, as best you can, because it's going to be a long run and you want to have something in reserve.

For, for later on. So

Jeff: that's a great answer. I love that answer.

Lorien: I hate that answer. , I don't wanna do that. I don't wanna have feelings. I

Jeff: I love the honesty.

Lorien: I don't wanna make a choice and I don't wanna work out why am I a writer? I have no idea.

Christopher: I, I'm, I'm with you completely. And I think I would've just laughed at my older self going, Hey, come on man. I'm just living for today. And, I'm going to have another latte.

Jeff: Exactly . That's sometimes we need a latte though. Let's be honest when they're, yeah, this was so great.

Lorien: It's been so great having you on the show.

We are honored to have you and be able to talk to you and get some of your wisdom.

Christopher: Thank you. That is just a delight for me to go under the hood like this. We went deeper and more into the bloody marrow of things that I had ever imagined. But that's great. I'm glad to have that chance.

Jeff: Awesome. And well, I'll just say for our audience, if you have read Chris's book, Lorien obviously sung its praises.

It's just so good. And there's so many ways to use Chris's theory for your writing. One thing I love to do with your work, Chris, is I'll look at what I've written and use the hero's journey as a diagnostic test to figure out where my story might be lacking some juice. So I really encourage if you're listening, I'm going to link Chris's book in the description, definitely check it out.

It's it will change the way you think about your work in a good way. So. Well, thank you.

Lorien: Thanks so much to Chris for joining us on today's show.

Jeff: You can read Chris's book, The Writer's Journey, and you can also find it on Amazon. It's great, definitely worth reading, and I will link it in the description below.

Lorien: And remember, you are not alone, and keep writing.

Jeff: And before you make your way out, I wanted to let you all know that the timing of this episode is very serendipitous. Obviously, Chris is one of the geniuses behind bringing the hero's journey into pop culture, and tomorrow, on TSL Workshops, that is Friday July 19th, we are dropping Pat Ferducci's second of three workshops, which is her version of the hero's journey.

She actually references Chris Vogler's book in her talk and it pairs pretty perfectly with what was talked about on the show today. So if you liked what you heard, I'm also including a link to sign up for TSL workshops below. You know what? Just sign up for one month, check out the workshop, see what you think.

If you like what you can stay, but if not, at least give it a try. Check it out. Sample it. Especially if you liked what we talked about today, but yeah, thanks for tuning in and have a great week, everyone.