The Virgin's Promise: Writing Stories of Feminine Creative, Spiritual and Sexual Awakening

the-virgins-promise.1_largeThrough the respective teachings and psychology of Jung and Freud and many others, author Kim Hudson creates a rather astonishing look at the breakdown and dissection of the virgin role in popular fiction and how the role applies to the order of storytelling and screenplays. For those interested, this is strictly a book for the writers, primarily the screenwriter who would want a second glance and exploration in to the virginal figure of lore and myth that involves the female virgin that forms a quest of exploration through hardships.

While the male virgin is more based around realistic hardships that also lead to a similar quest of exploration. The way author Hudson masterfully breaks down the elements of the character and the models of archetypes and molds, she manages to explain just about every popular tale in pop culture where our virginal hero is one who is guided on a quest and led through a journey of awakening aided by the coward i.e. “Star Wars.”

All the while also laying out the story of the god seeking a form of testing their own boundaries in the mortal world while leaving the comfort of their parental element i.e. “Superman.” While these stories and perspectives can be adjusted towards and fixed to just about any story in the world, Hudson instead keeps the thesis and brilliant analyses confined to the film world where she challenges even her own theories an assessments by breaking down a beat by beat evaluation of the virgin’s tale in films like “Shrek” and even in anti-virgin tales like “Mamma Mia!” and “The 40 Year Old Virgin,” two films that seem very disconnected and in a world of their own. But once Hudson completely draws upon their own beat by beat map of their arcs, they suddenly begin to look incredibly similar.

Startlingly so. Hudson has a sheer knack for expressing the deeper meaning behind the virginal tale and tackles a facet of cinema and storytelling that isn’t as explored as often as many would think. She takes the classic symbol of the pure innocent virgin and applies it to just about every story in the world from Theseus and the Minotaur to “Pretty Woman” and does so to allow the reader or writer to form their own molds or perhaps rely on said molds to form their own epic stories of coming of age in a world that will eventually destroy their womb and force them to abandon the virginal shell that, for some stories, is used as a form of protection against a cruel world filled with hardships and obstacles.

While also explaining the task of the virginal hero or victim, she also expresses the roles of the supporting characters in the world of the virgin including the mentor, the femme fatale, the coward, et al. and shows us how every single element in a story is crucial to the formation of what arc we want to display for the audience if we are to hope to write a remotely successful screenplay. This dissection can of course be regarded to any genre from drama to action adventure and through anecdotes and fragments of classic psychological studies involving the complexes and consciousness that play their own roles in the quest of the virgin to not only gain a form of sexual rebirth but or spiritual and physical rebirth. It’s an utterly engrossing read for any writer interested in sinking deep in to their characters.