During a career spanning twenty-five years of novel, film, and television work, I’ve two major tools most valuable: the yogic chakras for characterization, and Joseph Campbells model of the Heros Journey for plot structure.
These are not random choices, nor were they selected because of the many intelligent and thoughtful essays on their relationship to successful film or world myth.
Rather, they are important because they create a connection between the inner world of the writer, and the external world of the finished workand the reader.
A plot structure is nothing more than a tool for organizing events in temporal sequence. While there are more such structures than there are professional writers, few of them meet what thousands of students consider a critical test: are they actually easy to use and apply? A simple tool, however limited, can be of greater use than a complicated tool that requires years to master. Remember: you will achieve real quality in your writing only by mastering your basics.
The Heros Journey, extracted from thousands of years of world mythology, has the advantage of actually mimicking the path of life itself. The three...