21.42: Deconstructing the Heroine’s Journey

Deconstructing the Heroine's Journey

0:00This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com slash writingexcuses. Season 21, episode 42.

0:19This is Writing Excuses. Deconstructing the heroine's journey. Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers. I'm Mary Robinette. I'm Don Juan. I'm Erin. And I'm Howard. And today we are deconstructing the heroine's journey. And I, I'll be honest, like we went, when we decided to work on structure, we all sort of assigned out different ones to check out. And I was really excited to check out the heroine's journey because who doesn't like heroine?

0:48I'm just going to leave that.

0:52It's really important that when you add the plural to that, we like heroines. Heroines, that's right. Sorry, don't know what I was thinking. So who doesn't like heroines? And so I went and looked at it and what I thought was really interesting, and I will explain sort of what it is so that we're all on the same page, is just how gendered the heroine's journey is. Which maybe makes sense. It's a response to the hero's journey. But it is all about like the masculine and the feminine in a way that I don't think necessarily reflects our modern understanding of those terms.

1:24And so it's interesting sort of trying to figure out what's underneath. So I'm going to present it to y'all and you can tell me what you think is sort of underneath the surface that might really work for us without necessarily having to force everything into these particular gender binaries. But the heroine's journey is, first of all, much longer. The heroine has to go way further than the hero does. But it starts with the sort of separation from the feminine. That's sort of the belief that you're leaving the life that you know behind. You're caring for your people.

1:55You're in your world. You are the orphan before the orphan. Like you have parents at this point in a Disney story. And then you must separate from that because something happens to separate you. You then identify with the masculine and gather allies. I believe this is like you take action and move forward with people around you. Whether or not action is masculine, we could argue about that on a different podcast. Then you meet ogres and dragons. You have the trials that you face. You finally succeed. You like find the success that you gain.

2:27And this is basically where, according to the author, the hero's journey ends. You found your success. The back half, which is what I find the most interesting about the heroine's journey, is that then you awake to the fact that you feel like, you know, spiritually bereft. Like getting the success didn't get you what you thought it did. It's not quite what you needed. Then you have your descent and initiation to the goddess, which is sort of understanding kind of what you really need. It's like, I thought I got what I needed.

2:58It isn't really what I needed. And scholars who love the heroine's journey, feel free to write me that I'm wrong about this. But this is how I took it. Then you have your yearning to reconnect with the feminine, with who you were when your journey started. You go back. You heal the mother-daughter split. You heal your wounded masculine. There's a lot of healing that goes on. You reintegrate. And that's how things end. So a lot of the back half is about healing the things that set you on the journey in the first place and figuring out that basically what you achieved maybe wasn't what you truly needed in order to heal internally,

3:30that your external goals, your external victories didn't lead to an internally fully cohesive self.

Mapping the Heroine's Journey in Fiction

3:38What y'all think? I find it interesting. I mean, I have some issues with the very binary gendered nature of this. You know, I think we can flag that and put that aside for as much as possible. But the thing that really struck me as you were talking about it, and this is not something I know very deeply and haven't investigated that much, but how much this maps to one of my very favorite books of all time, which is Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown. What I love about that book, I'm going to spoil a lot of the book right here. It is about a princess who decides she wants to fight dragons.

4:11Dragons are mostly gone from the world. Everyone thinks she's crazy. Then a huge dragon shows up. She goes off to fight the dragon. She wins at great cost. It's a very brutal fight that she comes out of very deeply injured. What's fascinating about this book is that's the midpoint of the book. The back half of the book is dealing with the consequences of having fought the dragon and sort of the shadow that hangs over her and her family after that. And it strikes me that that book maps to a lot of these steps,

4:44as you're explaining them as I understand it. I don't know if it's 100% one-to-one, but the idea that there's a story past where the hero's journey, as Joseph Campbell described it, ends, that integration and finding a way to integrate with the community around you and integrate internally with yourself is its own conclusion of the story. I think it's a really interesting idea if we separate it out from the gendered aspect of it. Yeah, I agree with you. I think one of the things that is interesting about this is that it is dealing with the consequences

5:18of the big adventure, which is not something that we see that often in fiction. Also, the, you know, ignoring the, this, the heroine's journey was conceived in the 90s, last century. So, I'm just going to say this every time I can to make Dongguan sad. It's exposure therapy. We'll get there. Yeah, yeah. Um, but, but I do find it, uh, really interesting in that so much of it does, um,

5:55does hit some of the things that we've been talking about with the other, uh, plot structures and deconstructing that there's, that there are these contrasts. Um, and that a lot of the, the, the strength of the narrative comes from the contrasts of home versus, you know, uh, versus the, the, the, the road of trials, um, the, the success, you know, the descent in meeting the goddess. There's similarities. It's different. There's similarities to the idea of the, the dark night of the soul. You know, this, this point where the, the character is like, okay, but is this

6:29really what I want? Um, and going back to dream, it also looks a little bit like some aspects of that, you know, the denial, resistance, exploration, acceptance, and manifestation. There's this, is this what I want? And so I think it's, it's interesting having this, this different structure, but there are still ingredients that you can recognize from the other, uh, the other plot. Um, at times I feel like the greatest disservice that, uh, writers performed upon themselves was

Plot Structures and Their Inherent Biases

7:04turning, turning Campbell's, you know, attempt to globally understand religions into a model for plot structures. Uh, because... I mean, a vastly flawed project to begin with. Oh, no, and I, that's what I'm, that's, that's what I'm leaning. We, we took something that was flawed and we applied it to something completely different. And, uh, as, as a writer, I like

7:36looking at the hero's journey and the heroine's journey for some of the elements and insights that they provide about, well, if this happened, then sometimes the next step that naturally follows is this. Um, one of the challenges that we have is that if you write a hero's journey epic, whether or not you do it well, people will know exactly what you were doing because it fits a pattern we're familiar with. Um, I don't think you can do that with a heroine's

8:09journey epic yet because it's kind of unusual for us. Not everybody's going to get it, but it's worth looking at in that light because... So, something that, that I have been thinking about a lot, um, as a result of us recording this, this season, when we talked about Save the Cat, I realized I've never written anything that, using Save the Cat. Um, same thing with the four-point plot structure. And, and since we recorded those episodes, I've actually done that now. And so when I'm looking at the heroine's

8:43journey, I'm, I'm looking at it from a very different point of view because one of the things that I realized, we, we talk about tools, not rules, and we talk about these being recipes, but I want to talk to you really, really specifically about that with the heroine's journey because if you think about it as a recipe or a checklist, and before you sit down to write, rather than deciding this is the structure I'm going to use, think, what ingredients do I have that I'm excited about? And what recipe is going to work best with those ingredients?

9:15Because I have taken the same list of, I took, um, the same list of plot points and dropped them into Save the Cat and then pulled them out and dropped them separately into, um, the, uh, uh, for, for a point plot structure. And they offer different opportunities. So if you think about this as thinking, okay, this fits the story I want to tell, what elements am I missing

9:45and what opportunities are there that I can, can learn from an ad? Like where are the places that this can help me deepen it? But it's not, if I don't have this, it's wrong. It's not that there is one right way to, to talk about a story. Well, I think one thing that's also really important as we talk about tools, not rules, is to recognize that tools have a perspective. Tools have a bias. I'm not taking random shots at Joseph Campbell. I'm flagging something that's really important because if you use that rule set, you're going to end up with some of the biases that he baked into it intentionally

10:18or unintentionally. A lot of heroes journey stories, and therefore a lot of what we think of as the core of fantasy writing tends to be what I think of, or what is often called a restoration fantasy, right? The prince needs to return and bring the kingdom back to its prior state before the bad thing happened, right? This is Lord of the Rings, right? We need to get back to the place where things were good. We need to restore the king to the throne of Gondor, right?

10:48That's inherently kind of regressive, right? It's inherently saying the thing that happened before was better than the thing that's happening. Now there's a conservativism baked into that. What's interesting about the heroine's journey continuing past the stage of finding the boon of success in reaching for that integration is it is somewhat disruptive to the idea of a restoration, right? It is about we need to move forward from here. The restoration is coming halfway through the story. And so there is something very appealing about it. And I can see, again, like doing a real

11:18quick surface level mapping. I have not done a deep dive on this of, oh, maybe this maps to Ursula Gwynn's Left Hand of Darkness, right? Which is also a very anti-restoration book that is a book that's also literally about integrating masculine and feminine. And it's one of my very favorite novels of all time. It's very foundational to my thinking. And it's interesting to see how I was initially opposed to this heroine's journey conversation just because it is so gendered. But I can also start to see how some of these tools map and opens the door to telling different kinds of stories that aren't about ending this hero's journey with the restoration in this very

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Layering Plot Structures and Internal Conflict

13:54All right. So a question I have, based on the idea of, like, not ending necessarily with the big Star Wars moment, is what if structurally you do want to end with that? Like, what if you want to end with, like, we blew up the Death Star, but you still want to, like, incorporate some of the heroine's journey? Do you think you have to have this full circle in terms of plot in order to make this work? Or are there other ways to use this as a tool outside of that, even if you're using a more

14:28traditional structure? I think that you definitely can, because one of the things that I've also been enjoying playing with a lot is layering two plot structures on top of each other. So I think that you could, for instance, like, a lot of Star Wars is honestly just a big old heist. And so I think that you can have a heist that's happening while simultaneously having a character journey, an ensemble journey that is this heroine's journey. So that there is, you know, there's a big blow up

15:02that comes in the middle of it. And it seems like, ah, she's really stood up for herself now. And then it goes on to show the consequences of that and the, you know, all of those pieces while still trying to navigate the heist. I think you can absolutely do something like that. And just to get nerdy about Star Wars for a second to disrupt something here, we have this idea of Star Wars being this iconic hero's journey. And I do think it's true in certain ways. George Lucas himself was very obsessed with this idea, talks a lot about the hero's journey when he talks about

15:35Star Wars. However, much of how Star Wars was made was a lot of footage was shot, and then a story was assembled in the edit bay. That story was not assembled by George, that story was assembled by Marsha Lucas, his wife, who is incredibly important for the creation of what we now think of as Star Wars. Early viewings of that screening from all of George's very famous director friends, like Steven Spielberg, were like, this is incoherent. And then it got reworked into something very different. So I do think there's a lot of ways to look at how Star Wars is structured that is quite

16:07disruptive, actually, to the idea that this is a hero's journey because of the ensemble nature, because the rhythms in that movie are a little unusual and odd in, I think, a way that opens up different interpretations of it. So I like this idea of looking at it as a heist, looking at it through four-point. And I think there's ways to look at it through the heroine's journey and what things can we extract from that as things you can replicate that still get you to that big finale moment. You know, one of the things that Tracy and Curtis Hickman pointed out in Extreme Dungeon Mastery is

16:37that a lot of times we look at Star Wars as hero's journey and really the movie ends at the halfway point of the hero's arc. There is in the Campbellian monomyth this whole sense of return and then either exception or rejection back at home. And when I look at the heroine's journey, what I'm seeing is that last step on the hero's journey, the acceptance or rejection, that is, you know, half of the heroine's

17:09journey because we're actually going to explore how that piece works. And so returning to the question of can you have the big blow-up, you know, can you have hero's journey and also have heroine's journey? Well, if you're ending with the big blow-up, you only had half of the hero's journey anyway. So keep cutting and fitting however you want to. Yeah, I think also one thing that I really like is that there's so many, like, in that second half,

17:40which probably you could, like, slice into the first half if you wanted to. Like, you could, some of this is about all the different ways in which we have to reconcile with our actions. Like, there's a, to me, the mother-daughter split is a lot about expectations. What did people expect of me versus what did I do? And how do I feel about that? The healing the wounded masculine is a little bit about, like, what have my actions, there's, what did, what was I expected to do? And then what have my actions taught me about what

18:11I'm capable of doing? And how do I feel about that? Sort of reminds me of the, the old kind of thing that people often say that a moment of violence often teaches you a lot about yourself because you don't know how you'll react to violence until you do. And then you have to reconcile what you did with what you thought you would do. I thought I would hide, but instead I was very violent. I thought it would be very violent, but instead I hid. And there's like, that's something that's very primal and you learn and then you, that teaches you things about yourself. And so I think a lot of this is about figuring out like, how do I reconcile with the community

18:45I came from now that I've gone on this journey and I have changed? How do I reconcile with myself? How do I reconcile with who I thought I would be? And I think those are questions that you can have in the middle. Like you could have them at the end, but you could in the middle of going through the ogres and dragons, you could slaughter your first ogre and say, oh my gosh, like, what is this? Like, I didn't know I was capable of this kind of violence. Who am I now? And so I think one way to do it is actually to think about, are you tackling all these questions, even if you don't tackle them in this specific order? And I like that

19:16if you ever look at things about the heroine's journey, it's like portrayed as a circle, like one leads to the other. Once you've actually integrated everything together, then it's like your next journey begins. So at any point you can be at some place on this cycle. And what's interesting about the heroine's journey is it's fundamentally designed in opposition, right? It is about integration, but it begins in a place of opposition. And the opposition is to societal norms and standards, right? So the identification with the masculine and gathering of allies is this idea of she's buying into prescribed societal roles in a way that I think

19:51will lead her down a path that she'll realize isn't the right path, right? So there is this idea of rebellion baked into sort of the heroine's journey that is different from the trials that a hero faces, which aren't necessarily about societal structures or about, you know, dominant energies. It is, that is more about individual contest, right? And I think there's something interesting about how to integrate that into your writing as you're looking at, okay, what are the trials that this character is facing and how is, how are they going to respond to

20:22them? Honestly, the best tool I can think of for learning to use the heroine's journey as a tool or as a set of tools is to read it with a set of sticky notes or a note card or something next to you and, and identify points where it raises a question you'd never asked or a concept you've never explored, or it gives you a plot idea that, you know, hits like lightning.

20:56Uh, for me, that is often the best way to use any, any scholarly research text in any discipline, uh, is to allow myself to process as I go. Um, because there's things in that toolbox that I don't, I didn't even know that tool had a handle on it, but you're going to read it and you're going to say, ah, that exactly fits my hand. That's exactly what I needed in order to swing my story

21:26the way I need to swing it. Yeah. And, and I think one of those things also, as you were talking, um, understand that whichever recipe you're using, it's, it's going to encourage a specific type of story. Mm-hmm. Um, what Dong Wan was saying is that before about the, the hero's journey, it's very much the, the, uh, the, the hero against the world often. Um, the save the cat structure,

21:58because of the way it is written, it encourages you to write a story in which there is a bad guy, a very specific bad guy, because there's a, the bad guys close in moment. And so if you write that, you're going to do that, this is very much about an internal, like there doesn't, when you look at the heroine's journey, there doesn't have to be an antagonist. And so when you're doing that, you're, you're going to have, your story is going to lean towards being more contemplative. It is possible to subvert any of these, um, but recognize that like, what, what kind of story

22:36does this naturally want to tell what, and, and what biases, um, is it reinforcing? And are you going to use those? What I really like is how much of this is internal, right? How much is this, is the character's relationship to their own history and their own tools and their own choices? And as they're moving towards that integration, there's something really interesting of like, how do I move through the world? How do I operate in the world? How do I survive this world? Which I think applies itself to many, I mean, I think we keep comparing it to the hero's journey, because that's a little bit how it's structured in terms of this anti-Kembelian notion.

23:10And so I think we're trying to map it to adventure stories in a specific way, which makes sense in that context, but also what's the only thing is this applies to so many different story genres than the hero's journey can. I also think it's something that is very much about, because it's internal, it's a lot about internal agency more than external agency. So I think this can be a great tool for characters who do not have the opportunity to necessarily change the world the way their world is, but must figure out a way to live within the world that is around them and find a way to cope with that, or what are the

23:44changes that they want to make? What are the ways they want to live? Like stories of survival, stories of like just existing in the world that are still very deep and very rich, but aren't necessarily, and then at the end I win and everything is different. If you struggle to write, you know, internal conflict because it keeps coming out navel-gazy, then this is a great toolbox for you because it shows you the kinds of things that can make that

Homework and Final Thoughts

24:14interesting and engaging. And with that, we are going to go to our homework. What I'd like you to do is to pick one of three strands, relationship to community, relationship to self, or relationship to expectation, and track actually how that changes for your main character over the course of the story. What is their relationship to their community? Some will work better than others, but say, how is it at each major point that you're hitting, major plot point? How does that change either the relationship to

24:46community, self, or to their expectations? And see what arc you're actually building of the story, and when you get to the end, is there somewhere else you can go? This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

25:03Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dong Wan Song, Aaron Roberts, and Howard Taylor. This episode was engineered by Marshall Carr Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. For more information, visit writingexcuses.com.