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59 Structure Hr Heroine’s Journey Story Structures

Heroine’s Journey

A journey toward wholeness and connection.

What it is

The heroine's journey is a story structure whose ending is wholeness and connection rather than a won fight. The trouble starts with the name. "The Heroine's Journey" is not one model. At least three authors have published a structure under that name, and the three disagree with each other. So you get three of everything: three models, three authors, three arguments about what the story even is. When someone hands you "the heroine's journey" as a list of stages, the first useful question is whose.

Maureen Murdock's version, from her 1990 book, is a circle. A woman succeeds on the terms of an achievement culture, the prize proves hollow, she descends into everything she rejected to get there, and she returns whole. Gail Carriger's version, from 2020, is a different thing built on networks. Someone is abducted or lost, the lead gathers allies and information, and the ending is a reunion reached by negotiation rather than a victory won. Victoria Lynn Schmidt's version sits inside a character book, 45 Master Characters, and most writing blogs copy it without saying so.

Keep this in mind for the whole page: three structures, one label. The test for any of them is whether it fits the story you are writing. The sex of your lead settles nothing. All three are answers to the Hero's Journey, and a web search blends them into one stage list that nobody owns. Here they are pulled apart, with the owners' names attached.

Start with Murdock, because her book gave the element its usual name. Murdock is a psychotherapist who studied under Joseph Campbell, and her model came out of her clinic, not out of any plotting problem. Her clients were women in their thirties and forties. They had taken the heroic path and come out the other side with the degree, the title or the money. Then came emptiness, exhaustion and stress illness, and a feeling of having been betrayed. Her verdict was that they had been living by a model that denied their nature, and the model had done this to them.

The shape she drew in answer is a circle rather than a line, and you travel it clockwise through ten stations. First, the woman pushes away the feminine as she has met it, often the mother, or a confined female role. Second, she takes on the culture's masculine values, and allies turn up who reward her for it. Third, trials. Fourth, victory, which Murdock calls the boon. Fifth, the victory goes flat; on her diagram this awakening is labeled a death. Sixth, the descent, which is the book's own term, down into the material she rejected. Seventh, an urgent yearning to reconnect with the feminine. Eighth, mending the split between mother and daughter. Ninth, mending the wounded masculine. Tenth, integration, which her last chapter calls going beyond duality.

The hollow victory is the pivot. Up to that point the story reads as a character arc that is succeeding. After it, the bill comes due. The whole second half has one function, which is mending.

Murdock is candid about what her model is and is not. She says it is partly derived from Campbell, and that the part specific to women is the language of the stages, not the architecture. She says it does not fit every woman of every age, and that it is not restricted to women; her introduction addresses both genders' journeys. She says she drew it from herself and her own generation, the post-Sputnik cohort that was driven to achieve, and she describes herself as a father's daughter. She says the movement is cyclic and that several stages can overlap in one person at the same time. That kind of candor about limits is fair dealing. Online summaries delete it.

Some facts about the book, since the retellings garble them. Shambhala published The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness in Boston in 1990, and it is still in print. The 2020 thirtieth-anniversary edition adds a new preface from Murdock and a foreword by Christine Downing. The diagram came to her during her graduate training in Los Angeles, out of a family-sculpting exercise, and her website gives 1983 as the year the circle first occurred to her. The book is listed below, and it is the only first-hand access you have to what she actually claims.

Now the Campbell story, because several wordings of it circulate and most of them are wrong. The documented version is in her introduction. Her account runs like this. She went to Campbell in 1981 with a question: how does a woman's journey relate to the hero's? His reply, in her summary and outside quotation marks, was that women need not make the journey. The part she does quote is that the mythological tradition already holds the woman, and she need only realize that she is "the place that people are trying to get to". The next line warns against becoming a pseudo-male. An endnote hangs on that passage. Her own entry on the heroine's journey in the Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion lists among its references an interview with Campbell in New York on September 15, 1981.

So here is the status of the story. The record is her report, of a conversation she dates to 1981 and cites as an interview she conducted. Other second-hand versions cite a 2005 source and give an even shorter quotation. The rule for a writer is simple. Retell it as Murdock's own report, in her wording. Never turn the famous first clause into a Campbell quotation. Campbell is dead and cannot confirm it, so her account is the record.

The exchange matters for structure too. By her own account, the model is a response to that reply. Campbell's answer makes the woman the destination. Murdock's circle makes her the traveler, who goes a long way in the wrong direction and has to come back for herself.

Gail Carriger comes at it from fiction. She is a novelist, author of the Parasol Protectorate books, with an academic background in archaeology. Her 2020 book, The Heroine's Journey: For Writers, Readers, and Fans of Pop Culture, came out through her own imprint. It carries the same title as Murdock's book and is otherwise unrelated to it. Her sources are three goddess myths: Demeter from Greek myth, Isis from Egyptian, Inanna from Sumerian. Her structure has three parts, descent, search and ascent, and the engine is loss of a network. There is no call to adventure.

In the descent, someone is abducted, or a family or community is shattered. Appeals to those in power go ignored. The lead surrenders her standing or has it stripped from her. She retreats, and the retreat is mostly forced. In the search, most of the work is conversation. Her identity is disguised or altered. She assembles a substitute family out of whoever helps. She gathers information. When she enters the underworld, she goes accompanied, never alone. In the ascent, no duel is won. The parties reach a settlement. The reunion happens by negotiation, and the terms are a compromise that serves several people at once. Revenge and glory have no place in it. The closing image is company, people together. Acting through other people this way is a kind of agency, and the element on that is the general case.

Carriger takes up gender early. Her second chapter is about sex and gender, and her introduction says that sex characteristics have no bearing on whether a character is a hero or a heroine. Her examples make the point. The hero's-journey chapter works through Wonder Woman and Star Wars. The heroine's-journey chapter works through Harry Potter and Twilight. The argument of that pairing fits in one line: a female lead on a hero's journey, and a boy wizard on a heroine's. She has a second argument that matters if you write commercial fiction. A later chapter ties the structure's low standing to the low standing of its genres: romance, cozy mysteries, comfort reads, anything with a group-reunion ending. You can leave the diagnosis and keep the observation. A reunion ending that gets called soft may be a matter of taste rather than craft. Her final chapter is about writing like a heroine, which comes down to companions, asking for help as a strength, and achievement shared out, and it works as a checklist on a draft at once. She posted the full table of contents and an extract from the introduction on her own site on September 28, 2020; the link is listed below.

Victoria Lynn Schmidt's model is the one you have most likely met without a name on it. Writer's Digest Books published 45 Master Characters in 2001 and a revised edition in 2012. The bulk of the book is a catalog of mythic character models, and the Archetype element draws on that catalog. The closing section lays out two journeys, a feminine one and a masculine one. The feminine one circulates uncredited under the label "the heroine's journey".

Schmidt's feminine journey has nine stations and runs in a circle. The illusion of a perfect world. Betrayal. Awakening. Descent through the gates of judgment. The eye of the storm, an apparent victory and a calm that is false. Death, the true collapse, which comes directly after. Support. Rebirth. The moment of truth. Then a return to the same world with altered perception; there is no new world. The signature move is a false calm in the middle of the book followed by a real collapse. Of the three models this one is the easiest to outline from, because its stations are events rather than mental states. The false dawn and the collapse are her equivalents of the Midpoint and All Is Lost. The Heroine Journeys Project places her stages beside Murdock's, and that page, listed below, is the fastest way to see that the two differ.

There is a fourth thing the phrase can mean. Kim Hudson's The Virgin's Promise (Michael Wiese Productions, 2010) does not call itself a heroine's journey, yet it gets offered to anyone who comes looking for one. Its thirteen beats each have a name. The subject is awakening, creative, spiritual or sexual. The beats include the dependent world, the price of conformity, the secret life, exposure, and a reordering in which the world reshapes itself around her new self. Hudson's engine differs from the quest. Nobody goes out to fix the kingdom. The lead grows in place, and the kingdom adapts to her. If you looked at Murdock's circle and saw an awakening story rather than an achievement story, Hudson is where you get the beat sheet, and the appendices hold worksheets.

Three sorting questions tell the models apart. Does the story open with a rejection of the feminine and close with integration? Murdock. Does it open with a network breaking and close with a reunion reached by negotiation? Carriger. Does it have a false calm in the middle that someone has named the eye of the storm? Schmidt. A list that mixes them, say the eye of the storm followed by healing the wounded masculine, is a blog post rather than a model, and nobody is accountable for whether it works.

Why it matters

Structure earns its keep by showing you what you cannot see in your own draft. Three models means three real, distinct things get named. Each one points at a kind of story that other structure advice misreads.

Murdock names the story a conventional shape fails. Picture a novel where the lead reaches her goal in the middle of the book, and the book keeps going because the goal was the wrong one. Read with a conventional shape, that book has its climax halfway through and two hundred anticlimactic pages after it. Read with Murdock, the achievement is the pivot and the return is the motor. The second half's job is repair, and repair is a job, not sulking. If someone has told you your success novel sags after the promotion, this is the best diagnosis available.

Carriger names a competence that structure advice scores as weakness. A lead who asks for help, delegates, recruits, and wins by assembling people is doing something hard. Most craft advice prizes the solo actor, so every one of those moves draws the note that she is not driving her own plot, in substance if not in those words. Persuading five people to act is the opposite of passivity. Carriger's structure gives you a statement of what the book does, which spares you defending it beat by beat. The general case lives on the Agency element.

Schmidt names the false victory, and that is sound plotting for anyone. A mid-book win that turns out to be worth nothing is among the most reliable second-act engines there is. You do not need to care about the heroine's journey at all to use it.

The argument over the name is real, and it stays open here. Position A says the monomyth has a blind spot and a separate structure names it. The monomyth is Campbell's single pattern beneath hero stories. Murdock's stance, in its strongest form, is that her clients were hurt by adopting an alien model as a self-portrait, and no amount of neutral wording makes a road of trials explain a collapse after victory. Maria Tatar makes the historical version of the case in The Heroine with 1,001 Faces (Liveright, 2021). Set against Campbell's warrior template, she finds heroines across history armed with talk, curiosity and storytelling, and no sword. No canon formed around them because nobody was searching. Her conclusion is that naming is a necessity rather than an ornament. What goes unnamed goes unseen, and naming is a way of noticing.

The other side says the gender framing is itself the limitation. Carriger's version of this is the cleanest. She keeps the label, because it has a history and the pattern is no accident, and then her second chapter takes gender out of the definition. Hero and heroine become problem-solving modes, solo strength against collective connection. Tie the mode to a body and you lose the tool. Her examples are chosen to make everyone uncomfortable. Murdock, for her part, also rejects essentialism, the idea that traits belong to one sex by nature. Her introduction covers both genders, and her masculine and feminine are Jungian usage, traits anyone carries, never sex labels.

You do not have to settle it. Both positions are serious and both have been thought through for a long time. They are also asymmetric. Position A asks whether the pattern deserves its own name. Position B asks what the name should mean. A working writer does not adjudicate. You pick the description that improves the draft, and you must be able to name which model you used and what its label means.

Murdock suits the book that costs out a success. Disillusionment-and-return novels. Midlife novels. Literary fiction, upmarket women's fiction, family sagas. Any book that adds up the price of a success the reader has already watched happen. Sequels that go back and re-examine the victory of book one.

Murdock strains as a plotting tool, and the strain is by design. Her purpose was therapy and growth, never drafting. Several of her stations are inner conditions with no event attached; spiritual aridity is a state, not a scene. Outline from the circle and you get a mood-heavy middle. Her own caveat, that the movement is cyclic and the stages overlap, is true of lives and useless for a chapter plan. So diagnose a draft with Murdock, and draft from a beat-based model.

Carriger suits found families and series. Found-family fantasy, young adult, ensemble science fiction, cozies, comfort fiction, romance. Most series, because book two spends the network book one built. Her ending, compromise and reunion with nobody humiliated, is the promise those genres make, and the Reader Promise element is about keeping it.

Carriger strains where the genre contracts a lone showdown. A thriller that resolves by negotiation can work, and it defies what the reader came for, so you do it knowingly or not at all. She also has a weakness at sentence level. Her structure tells you who is in the room and what kind of win to write. It says nothing about propulsion across four hundred pages of gathering allies.

Schmidt asks the least and strains the least. You get a familiar shape with a better second act. The whole offer is right there, and it is a good one.

Real-world examples

Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2012): Murdock's circle, entered halfway around

Maria Semple's novel came out from Little, Brown in 2012. The form is epistolary, built from emails, memos and transcripts, with Bernadette's daughter Bee compiling the record and narrating. If you accept a story that starts in the middle of the circle, this is the clearest instance of Murdock's shape in widely read fiction.

The facts first. Bernadette Fox was a Los Angeles architect with a real reputation. Her Twenty Mile House, built with every material sourced from within twenty miles, earned her a MacArthur Fellowship. The buyer razed the house. She moved to Seattle, married Elgin Branch, a Microsoft star everyone calls Elgie, had Bee, and quit designing. When the novel opens she is agoraphobic. A remote assistant runs her errands. The neighbors are enemy territory to her. Several collapses land at once, and in the middle of an intervention held in her own home she vanishes. Bee refuses to accept the vanishing and goes looking, with Elgie. They find Bernadette at Palmer Station in Antarctica, working on a building there. She is designing again.

Now the mapping. The first station, the pushing away of the feminine, is not shown, so the mapping starts at the second. Everything before the novel is the masculine identification, the trials and the boon: the career, the prize, the house. The Seattle stasis the book opens on is the awakening to emptiness, and Semple is unusually precise about what that emptiness feels like from the inside. Paralysis plus contempt, not grief. The descent is literal, which is what the model asks for: southward, unreachable, into darkness. The return runs along the mother-daughter axis, because Bee is the one who will not let her go. Two healings happen in one motion, with Bee and with her work.

Be honest about the limit. The wounded-masculine station and the integration are thin. The book closes on the reunion and never shows the integration. What the model pays you back with is proof that the novel has a shape. The first half can look slack, since nobody is pursuing anything, yet it is a named stage with a function, and the momentum starts exactly where the model says it should, at the descent.

Educated (2018): five stations and a refused eighth

Tara Westover's memoir came out from Random House in 2018, and it is the hardest test you can give Murdock's circle. Five stations are present. The sixth and seventh, the descent and the yearning to reconnect with the feminine, do not show on this reading of the book. The eighth is declined.

The separation is absolute, and the model's language fits almost crudely. Westover grew up in a survivalist household below Buck's Peak in Idaho, with no school record. She leaves her mother's world and takes on the values of the institutions ahead of her. Her allies arrive in order: a brother who went first, then teachers, then supervisors. The trials are real. The boon is beyond argument: Brigham Young University, then Cambridge, then a doctorate in history. The aridity arrives on schedule, but it shows up as the price the prize exacts from her family rather than as disappointment in the prize itself.

Then the circle halts at station eight, the mending between mother and daughter. The station is absent from the book because it is absent from the life. The book closes in estrangement. About ten minutes with the model will name the feeling most readers finish with: the complete architecture of a return story, minus the return.

One caution. Concluding from this that the book is unfinished would be putting the template over the book. Murdock's own framing is psychological possibility, never requirement. A refusal that has been earned is not a missing stage.

The Twilight novels (2005 to 2008): Carriger's ascent, delivered and mocked

Stephenie Meyer's four Twilight novels are Carriger's chosen example, cited as Twilight, and the structural point deserves attention whatever you think of the books.

Read as a network story, they are consistent from the first page. Bella arrives in Forks uprooted. Her goal across all four books is membership in a family. Not power, not a throne, not a quest object. The Cullens are a found family before they are anything else. Her moves are social almost without exception: negotiation, persuasion, secrecy, brokering alliances between groups that hate each other, standing gained by being vouched for. The ability she ends up with is protective rather than offensive, a shield she holds over other people.

The ending of Breaking Dawn (2008) was ridiculed on release for exactly the thing that makes it structurally coherent. A huge confrontation with the Volturi, and almost no fighting. Allies arrive from several continents. Witnesses are gathered. The half-human child is shown to be no danger, and the Volturi withdraw. Through the monomyth lens that is an anticlimax, a duel that never happens. Through Carriger's lens it is the ascent exactly as specified: a settlement win, produced by the network, with no glory and no revenge. You can dislike the execution. The book still delivers the ending its own structure calls for, rather than some other structure's.

Wonder Woman (2017): a female lead on a hero's journey

The 2017 film gets mismapped onto the heroine's journey all the time. Carriger chose it on purpose as a worked example in her hero's chapter, alongside Star Wars.

The reasoning is structural, so it survives any argument about the film itself. The lead leaves her island home against orders. A mentor guides her crossing into a strange world. Tests follow, then a reversal, then resolution by one-on-one combat with a god. That follows the monomyth closely, and the sex of the lead has nothing to do with the sequence.

The most expensive mistake here is the mapping itself: female lead, so heroine's journey. The fit is poor, and the false conclusions follow, either that the story is broken or that the model is useless. Neither follows. The mistake in reverse costs even more. A writer with a male lead and a story that runs on losing and rebuilding a network gets pushed by editors toward a lone showdown the book does not want, and the writer never looks at this element, because the label said, in substance, not for you.

An everyday scenario: the draft that went flat at the promotion

Say a novelist, call her Oona Blyth, has a hundred and ten thousand words of a draft. Her lead left her mother's upholstery workshop at nineteen, trained in logistics, and rose to procurement chief for a hospital network. In chapter twenty-two she gets a seat on the board. Oona's beta readers agree on two things. The first half is good, and the book collapses at chapter twenty-two.

A three-act reading says act two has no spine after the midpoint. The reading is accurate and no help, because all of Oona's material lives in that stretch. A Murdock reading says something different. The board seat is the boon, not a sagging midpoint. Flatness after the boon is expected. So the question stops being how to add conflict and becomes whether the flatness is dramatized, happening to someone in a scene, or narrated. In Oona's draft it is narrated. Meetings.

The repair goes station by station and leaves the structure alone. The awakening needs a scene, a moment where the emptiness forces a decision, rather than a mood. The descent means taking her out of her job, and in this book that is a homecoming. And the subject of the return half is already sitting in chapter three, unused: her mother, Branwen, the workshop, and the parting words the daughter said at nineteen. The model invented nothing. It showed which half of the book was carrying the weight, and it exposed the second half as written like an epilogue to a story that was only half finished.

Try it yourself

You need your draft or outline and something to write on. There is no template to paste; the steps are the tool.

  1. Find out whose stage list you are holding. Before you use any heroine's-journey list, identify its author. If it gives no credit to Murdock, Carriger or Schmidt, close the page. A list spliced from three sources will contradict itself halfway through your outline.
  2. Write two sentences about the last page. Sentence A says who is physically present on the final page. Sentence B says whether the lead arrived there by defeating someone or by assembling people. A lone victor standing over an opponent is a hero's journey, whatever the lead's gender. A crowd and an agreement is Carriger. If you can answer A but only feel your way to B, you have located your mismatch.
  3. Locate the boon. Mark the point where the lead gets what she set out to get. If that lands mid-book and the book keeps going, you have a Murdock candidate, not a broken second act. The rest of the book has the job of repair. Escalation is the wrong tool for it.
  4. List what happens after the boon. Write down every chapter after the boon and note the event in each one, the thing that happens. Three mood-only chapters in a row means you have a descent into mood rather than a story. Murdock is weakest here, so you have to supply the structure yourself. For external events that carry inner change, use the Try-Fail Cycle and the Midpoint.
  5. Count the requests for help. Tally every time the lead asks for help and what each request costs her. In Carriger's shape, those requests are the main plot tool, so there are many and they vary. In the hero's shape there are few, and each is reluctant. Whichever you find, you have discovered a genre mismatch before an editor does.
  6. Find the mid-book false victory. Locate the apparent win in the middle of the book. The reader has to sense the coming failure, fully or faintly. An eye of the storm needs a visible flaw in the scene itself, or the collapse that follows will feel arbitrary.
  7. Write down what she rejected at the start. Murdock's circle needs an opening rejection. List what the lead spurned, abandoned or despised early on: a person, a place, a kind of work, a way of life. No rejection means no target to return to, and that is the usual cause of an unearned redemption. At character level the same things show up as The Lie and the Wound.
  8. Keep a structure sentence where you can see it. One line that names the model, written like this: "This is Carriger's heroine's journey, with a Murdock-shaped second half." Half the damage these models do comes from using two of them at once without noticing. The sentence exposes it.

Common mistakes and misunderstandings

Treating one name as one model. There are three dated models: Murdock's from 1990, Schmidt's from 2001, Carriger's from 2020. An uncredited list is almost always a blend. Choose one, and tell your editor and your writing group which one you chose.

Assuming a female lead means a heroine's journey. These structures describe how a problem gets solved, not what body is solving it. Carriger says sex is irrelevant and puts Wonder Woman in her hero's chapter. Murdock says her model covers both genders.

Quoting Campbell's reply as Campbell. The famous first clause, that women need not make the journey, is Murdock's summary. Her quoted part is that the woman is "the place that people are trying to get to". The right attribution is Murdock's report, in her wording. None of it is a published position of Campbell's.

Reading masculine and feminine as men and women. The terms are Jungian. They name traits that everyone carries. Murdock's stations are not rules for women, and ambition is not male. Her theme is the forced choice between a woman's two halves.

Drafting from Murdock's circle. The circle is a therapy map. Its stations are conditions, so use it to diagnose and nothing more. To draft, go to Hudson's thirteen beats, Schmidt's nine stations, or the Beat Sheet element.

Calling a group ending soft by default. One of the three models requires that ending. If the reunion is unearned, say so, as an unearned reunion. If it is earned and still feels slight, ask whether the objection is to the craft or to the kind of story. Carriger has a whole chapter on how this ending gets marked down by genre.

Running two models at once. Murdock's stations and Schmidt's do not line up. Splice them and you get two midpoints and no spine. Use one model per pass, and run a deliberate second pass with the other only if the first finds nothing.

Expecting this page to settle the gender debate. The question of whether story structure should be framed by gender is live, with serious people at both ends, and it stays unsettled here. Your draft needs an accurate description of itself, not a verdict.

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