I opened my Plotting Fiction blog a few months ago with the intention of starting a discussion of the fiction plotting techniques that I taught and employed when I was actually writing fiction for a living. That was 1985 to 1997 for anyone who’s interested. During those years I published five historical romances as Constance Bennett and fourteen contemporary category romances for Harlequin (mostly Superromance, with an American and an Intrigue thrown in for good measure).

I also taught at countless writer’s workshops and along the way developed some very useful tools that I thought I’d share.

Unfortunately, getting that information into my laptop has progressed more slowly than I had anticipated–about ten years too slowly…

However, I recently read the novel, Twilight, and it occurred to me that Bella’s journey into romance with a Vampire fit very nicely into the plotting matrix I developed for my own use after I read Christopher Vogler’s amazing “The Writer’s Journey,” which is, of course, based on the 12 steps Joseph Campbell illuminated in his seminal work, The Hero’s Journey. I readily confess I have not read Campbell. I am not literary. I write popular fiction. Genre fiction, which to many people is a four letter word spelled with five letters. But I have read Vogler’s 12 Steps and when I tried to apply it to virtually any work, I always started stumbling around step 8 and by step ten I was hopelessly lost.

So I revised the 12 steps into 13 steps that made more sense to me when I was trying to pull together plots of my own. I call this particular plotting matrix “Heresy: A Revision of the Hero’s Journey.”

Over the next few of weeks, I’m going to lay out the Journey steps –not as Vogler outlined them, or Campbell, but as I used them in plotting some of the 20 novels I wrote when I was lucky enough to actually be supporting myself doing nothing but pounding on the keys of an increasingly sophisticated writing machines. I’m going to use the outrageously popular Twilight as one of the examples to illustrate each step — not because it’s a fabulous piece of literature or is even particularly well plotted, but because it’s a great piece of popular fiction. One of the reasons it struck so many chords with people is because it tells the story of a Hero’s Journey–a mythological structucture that story tellers have been using to enrapture eager listeners and readers since man first started telling stories around campfires.

If you’re a novice writer struggling to get past the first few chapters of your Great American Popular Fiction Novel, I hope you’ll find something in these posts that speaks to you and lights your way deeper into the book you’re writing, planning to write, or have stuck in a desk drawer because you reached the place where you couldn’t figure out what comes next.

Please consider subscribing to my updates that will notify you whenever I post each blog entry. I look forward to seeing you here on my PlottingFiction.com blog.

Connie Bennett

Oh, by the way, if you’re interested (I’m not the former sugar addict or jewelry maker connie bennett. You have to scroll down on Amazon or Barnes & Noble to find me, but I’m there. I’ll post a list of my books in a day or two.)