THE HEROINE’S LABYRINTH

Burton pitches a female counterpart to the “Hero’s Journey” story structure in this craft book and writer’s guide.

The author, a writer and speaker, was deep into writing his first novel, Far Away Bird (2020), when he noticed a problem. He’d long relied on the “Hero’s Journey” structure coined by mythologist Joseph Campbell, who famously used a theory of primordial archetypes to identify a “universal” story pattern of a central hero leaving home and crossing a threshold into an unknown world to defeat evil. Burton found that in many woman-led stories, protagonists didn’t leave their home or “native culture” to confront conflict, but rather moved deeper into it, uncovering its labyrinthine secrets. From this key difference, Burton argues, an entirely different story structure unfolds, one that “exists now, has always existed, and will continue to exist for as long as there’s still a heroine to write about.” This “heroine,” while generally female, can be any protagonist whose story follows this “inward” journey. Burton guides us through what he has identified as key “heroine” archetypes, presented not as inviolable, linear story beats, but in the more “intuitive” form of overturned tarot cards, creating “a loose story structure for your imagination and creativity.” The archetypes, including figures like the charming but villainous Masked Minotaur and story beats such as the Captivity Bargain, are grouped under three linear acts: Orientation (Immersion), Exploration (Self-Realization), and Permutation (Rearrangement). Each chapter ends with a deft, bullet-pointed summary of the archetype and its function in the “Heroine’s Labyrinth,” as well as a series of writing exercises encouraging the reader to identify the archetypes for themselves in popular movies and TV shows (The Hunger Games series, Moana, and Ex Machina feature prominently). A final rundown of popular genres from horror to memoir notes which “Heroine’s Labyrinth” archetypes may be more or less prominent within them.

Burton’s prose is accessible, lucid, and concise without sacrificing detail: He moves quickly through the traits that make up his “Heroine’s Labyrinth,” substantiating his theories with more than 200 examples from texts, from the Bible to Barbie. The book can be useful for developing and conceptualizing structure, even for readers who don’t subscribe wholesale to archetypal theory. The book occasionally runs the risk of taking a gender-essentialist approach to its story structure. Luckily, Burton largely sidesteps this trap, noting that the “heroine” structure can apply just as easily to some stories led by men (Amadeus, The Dark Knight, and Fight Club, to name a few) and repeatedly emphasizing the first rule of the labyrinth: “Even under the most oppressive, worst-case scenarios, we must see the heroine as the sovereign being.” His work smartly illuminates the way that the same “home” that serves as comfort for Campbell’s male hero figure may be both cage and battleground for protagonists subjugated by the society they live in. The result is an incisive, highly quotable work that doubles as both applicable writing advice and sharp cultural critique.

A readable, refreshing entry in the cluttered world of writing advice.