I am a brilliant procrastinator and zealot of self doubt. In
fact, to keep my doubts at bay, I call the first draft of my screenplays
the “Lewis and Clark” draft to remind myself not to fret over the
imperfections that are a necessary part of discovering the unknown.
Earlier in my career, writing was like running through a fog
trying to find a sense of direction, and by the time I bounced painfully
off enough mist-shrouded walls with enough scrawled file cards
strewn around, some kind of script came out of the process. And then I
found a hero with a thousand solutions—or, really, one
solution—Christopher Vogler.
Vogler’s distillation of the seminal book The Hero with a Thousand Faces by scholar Joseph Campbell gave us Campbell’s vast knowledge about universal hero myths into seven easily digestible pages of clear-cut directives.
Campbell is considered by many as a patron saint of screenwriters. George Lucas has credited him as inspiring the characters and story construction of Star Wars. What Campbell showed in his book was that the world’s myths, legends and parables, across time and all cultures, followed a singular route-stem or journey. Essentially, he said, the world’s folklores and myths comprise one massive human meta-story.
Vogler, who spent time with Campbell, found a way to simplify the latter’s dense treatise down to crib-sheet length to suit the attention span of Hollywood story execs. His guide is called A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Famously, Vogler is said to have deliberately left his work in a Xerox machine at Disney whence it made its way to every production office in town. It changed the development process in Hollywood and garnered Vogler a career as an industry writing Guru—which he truly is. And when I snagged one of those errant circulating copies of A Practical Guide, it was a relief to see that stories could have a theory-based, emotional logic. Vogler’s steps acted as a story compass—not as a set of rigid rules, but, rather, as inspiring story markers to help writers like me through our own fogs of creation toward discovery.
Subsequently, Vogler penned the inspirational classic The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, a broad-minded elaboration of his understanding of Campbell’s and his own philosophies. One of my favorites quotes from Vogler is this one from Buckminster Fuller, illustrating his book’s purpose: “I’m not trying to copy Nature. I’m trying to find the principles she’s using.”
If we understand why and how our audience is designed to respond to stories, then we can more effectively aim for their emotional bull’s eye. I spoke to Vogler recently and asked for his responses to two quick questions.
What does he perceive as the greatest mistake development executives make?
Vogler: It is failure to understand creative process. They want writers to tell them what they’re going to write before they have written it, not realizing it is a process of discovery.
With massive changes in technology under way, what does he see as the future of story telling?
Vogler: Commercial stories are going to deal more and more with philosophy, especially questions of identity, because people are so totally disoriented by modern culture. We crave moral guidelines or stories that allow us to explore what we think about proper human behavior. We will also reach back into the treasure chest of the past for classic or forgotten stories, the epics, legends, myths and fairy tales of our ancestors, because they are desperately needed for orientation, just as they were in the old days.
What Vogler and I absolutely agree on is that stories are organic, that we are designed to tell and receive them by the outcome of our own evolution. We are defined by eternal and immutable themes: Love, jealousy, rivals, enemies, re-defining oneself, and so on.
Over millions of years of evolution, these thematic instincts have been programmed into our genes, so no matter what media we use to tell our stories, the stories at their essence will always be the same. So, theoretically, the genuinely strong narratives, based in the eternal thematic foundations that Campbell evoked, should last like (like Homer and Shakespeare) while the day-to-day dross of the multiplex will wither away in no time. Pardon my delight and surprise, then, when I discovered there is proof to support that theory!
Meet Department Chair and Professor of Economics Paul Zak of Claremont Graduate University, where he is also the founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies. Zak and a team of fellow researchers found that, by showing human subjects a video of a selected story and taking blood samples—you read that right, blood samples—the viewers showed heightened levels of cortisol and oxytocin in their brains.
Zak, who coined the term Neuroeconomist, is an expert on oxytocin. In fact, he’s the author of the acclaimed The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity, all about the evolutionary significance of oxytocin as a crucial element of social nurturing. So, on the one hand, we have cortisol, a chemical released in times of stress. With regard to experiencing stories, the more one pays attention to the evil-doings of the bad guy, say, or the sufferings of a good guy, the more cortisol floods our brains. But, at the same time, oxytocin is produced—the hormone associated with care, connection and empathy. Breastfeeding, for example, stimulates the flow of oxytocin in mothers and reinforces the bond with their baby. A hug triggers the release of oxytocin and stimulates empathetic feelings.
When Zak showed subjects a video with no dramatic arc, such as one of a dad and his son walking through a zoo together. He found the eventless, non-emotionally charged story produced no chemicals and no effect. But the videos that fired up the inner chemistry had to be stories with a specific structure. Strangely, his findings coincide with the 19th Century German playwright Gustav Freytag’s theory of the dramatic arc. Like Campbell, Zak has become scientifically convinced that there is a universal story, a story that our biology is chemically attuned to, it’s always been there, a common strand running through our disparate societies.
Zak also made another discovery, that people who had been watching a story that produced these chemicals, were more likely to help strangers in need or to dedicate themselves to helping a charity. So he proved that stories can not only change our brain chemistry but can change our behavior.
Fine, you say, but what the hell has this got to do with movies?
With all the millions invested in story development, it’s exciting to learn that we’re closing in on a more precise understanding of the human mechanisms that react to narrative. Just as ill-fitting pipes will leak if you ran water through them, faulty and poorly conceived stories simply won’t flow from screen to brain and trigger the chemicals necessary for an audience to response optimally. And without that chemical reaction, the story doesn’t succeed.
There are researchers using high-tech means like MRIs to improve our understanding of how we perceive and react to stories. It will be intriguing to see if the studios can keep from wiring us all up to create algorithms and churn out synthetic stories. Let’s hope that, instead, they embrace this knowledge to emancipate artistic creativity, to condition artists to explore deeper our collective subconscious and to invest in the ambitious goal of creating new legends and myths for our time–stories that will unite our diverse cultures and carry human civilization forward in harmony.
Vogler’s distillation of the seminal book The Hero with a Thousand Faces by scholar Joseph Campbell gave us Campbell’s vast knowledge about universal hero myths into seven easily digestible pages of clear-cut directives.
Campbell is considered by many as a patron saint of screenwriters. George Lucas has credited him as inspiring the characters and story construction of Star Wars. What Campbell showed in his book was that the world’s myths, legends and parables, across time and all cultures, followed a singular route-stem or journey. Essentially, he said, the world’s folklores and myths comprise one massive human meta-story.
Vogler, who spent time with Campbell, found a way to simplify the latter’s dense treatise down to crib-sheet length to suit the attention span of Hollywood story execs. His guide is called A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Famously, Vogler is said to have deliberately left his work in a Xerox machine at Disney whence it made its way to every production office in town. It changed the development process in Hollywood and garnered Vogler a career as an industry writing Guru—which he truly is. And when I snagged one of those errant circulating copies of A Practical Guide, it was a relief to see that stories could have a theory-based, emotional logic. Vogler’s steps acted as a story compass—not as a set of rigid rules, but, rather, as inspiring story markers to help writers like me through our own fogs of creation toward discovery.
Subsequently, Vogler penned the inspirational classic The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, a broad-minded elaboration of his understanding of Campbell’s and his own philosophies. One of my favorites quotes from Vogler is this one from Buckminster Fuller, illustrating his book’s purpose: “I’m not trying to copy Nature. I’m trying to find the principles she’s using.”
If we understand why and how our audience is designed to respond to stories, then we can more effectively aim for their emotional bull’s eye. I spoke to Vogler recently and asked for his responses to two quick questions.
What does he perceive as the greatest mistake development executives make?
Vogler: It is failure to understand creative process. They want writers to tell them what they’re going to write before they have written it, not realizing it is a process of discovery.
With massive changes in technology under way, what does he see as the future of story telling?
Vogler: Commercial stories are going to deal more and more with philosophy, especially questions of identity, because people are so totally disoriented by modern culture. We crave moral guidelines or stories that allow us to explore what we think about proper human behavior. We will also reach back into the treasure chest of the past for classic or forgotten stories, the epics, legends, myths and fairy tales of our ancestors, because they are desperately needed for orientation, just as they were in the old days.
What Vogler and I absolutely agree on is that stories are organic, that we are designed to tell and receive them by the outcome of our own evolution. We are defined by eternal and immutable themes: Love, jealousy, rivals, enemies, re-defining oneself, and so on.
Over millions of years of evolution, these thematic instincts have been programmed into our genes, so no matter what media we use to tell our stories, the stories at their essence will always be the same. So, theoretically, the genuinely strong narratives, based in the eternal thematic foundations that Campbell evoked, should last like (like Homer and Shakespeare) while the day-to-day dross of the multiplex will wither away in no time. Pardon my delight and surprise, then, when I discovered there is proof to support that theory!
Meet Department Chair and Professor of Economics Paul Zak of Claremont Graduate University, where he is also the founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies. Zak and a team of fellow researchers found that, by showing human subjects a video of a selected story and taking blood samples—you read that right, blood samples—the viewers showed heightened levels of cortisol and oxytocin in their brains.
Zak, who coined the term Neuroeconomist, is an expert on oxytocin. In fact, he’s the author of the acclaimed The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity, all about the evolutionary significance of oxytocin as a crucial element of social nurturing. So, on the one hand, we have cortisol, a chemical released in times of stress. With regard to experiencing stories, the more one pays attention to the evil-doings of the bad guy, say, or the sufferings of a good guy, the more cortisol floods our brains. But, at the same time, oxytocin is produced—the hormone associated with care, connection and empathy. Breastfeeding, for example, stimulates the flow of oxytocin in mothers and reinforces the bond with their baby. A hug triggers the release of oxytocin and stimulates empathetic feelings.
When Zak showed subjects a video with no dramatic arc, such as one of a dad and his son walking through a zoo together. He found the eventless, non-emotionally charged story produced no chemicals and no effect. But the videos that fired up the inner chemistry had to be stories with a specific structure. Strangely, his findings coincide with the 19th Century German playwright Gustav Freytag’s theory of the dramatic arc. Like Campbell, Zak has become scientifically convinced that there is a universal story, a story that our biology is chemically attuned to, it’s always been there, a common strand running through our disparate societies.
Zak also made another discovery, that people who had been watching a story that produced these chemicals, were more likely to help strangers in need or to dedicate themselves to helping a charity. So he proved that stories can not only change our brain chemistry but can change our behavior.
Fine, you say, but what the hell has this got to do with movies?
With all the millions invested in story development, it’s exciting to learn that we’re closing in on a more precise understanding of the human mechanisms that react to narrative. Just as ill-fitting pipes will leak if you ran water through them, faulty and poorly conceived stories simply won’t flow from screen to brain and trigger the chemicals necessary for an audience to response optimally. And without that chemical reaction, the story doesn’t succeed.
There are researchers using high-tech means like MRIs to improve our understanding of how we perceive and react to stories. It will be intriguing to see if the studios can keep from wiring us all up to create algorithms and churn out synthetic stories. Let’s hope that, instead, they embrace this knowledge to emancipate artistic creativity, to condition artists to explore deeper our collective subconscious and to invest in the ambitious goal of creating new legends and myths for our time–stories that will unite our diverse cultures and carry human civilization forward in harmony.
