Secrets of Story Episode 47: What Is The “Heroine’s Labyrinth”?
September 6, 2024
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It’s another episode of my podcast with Matt Bird, “The Secrets of Story”! This time we have on guest Douglas A. Burton, who wrote a book about storytelling structure called The Heroine’s Labyrinth. You can listen to the episode here:
So what’s the Heroine’s Labyrinth book all about? Well, we’ve all heard about “The Hero’s Journey” structure, in which the hero typically leaves home, ventures out into a wild world of adventure, makes allies and enemies, undergoes some crisis, defeats a powerful villain, and returns home having changed. (This hero can be male or female or whatever; it’s just a structure.)
But something bothered Doug Burton about the Hero’s Journey. He noticed that some stories that we know and love, whether they be Oscar winners like Everything Everywhere All At Once, blockbusters like Titanic, cartoons like Tangled and Frozen, or classics like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre don’t really follow the Hero’s Journey formula. Yeah, maybe you can contort or misrepresent their structures into a Hero’s Journey scheme, but it doesn’t feel like a natural fit.
So how are the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Dorothy Gale, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Clarice Starling, and Bella Swan different than the “hero’s journey” stories of Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, Conan the Barbarian, and such? Doug contends that they follow pattern that he identifies as “The Heroine’s Labyrinth.” (And again, that’s just the name of the structure. The heroine doesn’t have to be female. Movies like The Shawshank Redemption, Total Recall, Fight Club, The Truman Show, and many others are more accurately described by the Heroine’s Labryinth rather than the Hero’s Journey.)
The thing I liked best about Doug’s book is that he makes a lot of bold, specific claims about what constitutes a Heroine’s Labyrinth story. There’s lots of “news you can use” for writers. Just as the Hero’s Journey has specific tropes like the Refusal of the Call, the Belly of the Beast, the Special Weapon, etc., the Heroine’s Labyrinth has its own concepts like the Masked Minotaur, the Sacred Fire, the Captivity Bargain, and more.
Intrigued? I definitely recommend this book. I’ve bought it for other writer friends as a gift. You can get your own copy here, and of course you can listen to Doug describe his original and compelling ideas in discussion with Matt and me on the podcast here.
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