This week, Fable and the Verbivore dig into the Heroine’s Journey story structure.

A couple weeks ago, we covered the Hero’s Journey story structure, its prevalence in fiction and movies, and its limitations. We also loosely contrasted it with the Heroine’s Journey story form and promised to revisit it more thoroughly in a separate episode. And that day is today. :-)

Neither of these structures are mutually exclusive, a story can reflect beats from both or one or none of these arcs and still be a great narrative. These are not the only story structures. The Heroine’s journey also tends to focus on defining things by the masculine (external, active) and the feminine (internal, reflective) as aspects, but that’s not the same thing as gender. These stories are not binary and make the assumption that as human beings we each have elements of both the masculine and the feminine within us all.

In this episode, we admit that we’re beginning learners ourselves in this less common story structure. But like anything, we learn best by just starting and doing. The Heroine’s Journey is not as well known, because we don’t see it as often in the stories that are told in our world today. But, we feel that just means we should more actively seek them out.

That said, we cover several stories that you might already be familiar with that use elements of this structure. Here are a few of the movies and books mentioned:

Mulan (Animated)

Brave (Animated)

The Hunger Games Trilogy

The Matrix Trilogy

The Divergent Trilogy (Book)

Six of Crows Duology

We hope you enjoy this episode. Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore