This month, Janet, Marianne and Christine join JP and Crys for another book club, this time reading The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger. They discuss hot takes, useful tips and how they’ll incorporate this book’s teachings into their own works.
Show Notes
The Virgin’s Promise by Kim Hudson
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
45 Master Characters by Victoria Lynn Schmidt
Better Off Divorced by Marianne Hansen
Your Brand Should be Gay (Even if You’re Not) by Re Perez
Transcript
Crys: Hello friends. This is episode number 38 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is April 7th as we’re recording. We are here once again with Book Club with a special guest. Lon wasn’t able to make it this week. So I’m Crys Cain and we’re going to do some introductions.
JP: I’m JP Rindfleisch.
Marianne: I’m Marianne Hansen.
Janet: Oh, I’m Janet Kitto.
Christine: I’m Christine Daigle, swapping in for Lon. Swap one SF writer with another, nobody will notice.
Crys: Okay. I did say that the critics said this was an interesting cast decision, Christine as Lon.
Christine: Yeah, I’ll do my best. I’ll do my best to bring the Lon energy.
Crys: So we are reading The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger this week.
And this is, I would say a complimentary resource for people who already know what the hero’s journey is. And for my own personal taste, the better option, but we will get to that. Hot takes everybody.
JP: I liked it a ton.
Marianne: I haven’t… I have a lot of issues and we’ll just discuss one right now, but… she does branch out and say that you can do more than just these two, but it frustrates me that it seems like it comes down to just two things. You have a hero’s journey and a heroine’s journey.
Wait, did I say that correctly? And so that sometimes frustrates me a little bit. But that’s not the fault of her writing or this book, but just that general idea kept frustrating me as I read this book.
Crys: And so the character archetype and the drug are pronounced the same way. They just spelled differently.
Janet: I love this book because I’ve already studied the Virgin’s Promise by Kim Hudson. And so I did want to learn Gail’s take on it. And she focuses on the story structure and on narration. She doesn’t focus, she even says, less on the internal struggles. And that’s the one difference that I found between the Virgin’s Promise and this one.
Crys: Excellent. That was going to be a question I had for you and Christine for the comparison to the Virgin’s Promise. How about you, Christine? Hot take.
Christine: Yeah, no, I really liked it. I’m a bit of a story craft nerd, but I haven’t read a craft book in a while because I always find it’s like learning a new golf swing. Once you read a craft book, then you’re just conscious of it. And every thing you’re doing sucks.
So it was nice for me to read this because I am very familiar with Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces and Vogler’s take on that. And Dan Harmon’s Story Circle take on that and then Virgin’s Promise.
So I guess I was expecting it to be like Virgin’s Promise, which it is not. And I really did like it as an alternate story structure to the hero’s journey. And just the way that she presents… really, what is strength? And I just love how she presents it. It doesn’t have to be an individual and solitary journey and that we can look at strength as being more collective.
I really loved that aspect and I was really glad that I read it. I really feel like it adds more tools to my story arsenal and gave me a better understanding of stories that I was like this one doesn’t follow Hero’s Journey or Virgin’s Promise, and I’m just not quite sure what it is. So it was really eye-opening for me in that regard. And I really appreciated that.
Crys: So riffing off what you said, does anyone want to give a brief sentence of what the hero’s journey is? Not that there’s entire books written about this or anything so that we can frame our conversation of what the heroine’s journey is in contrast. If not, I have a list of words that I find helpful.
All right, cool. I’ll do that. So the Hero’s Journey as taught by Campbell and Vogler is basically 12 steps? 12 stages of a journey that is very linear. And Virgin’s Promise and the Heroine’s Journey, which is the one that we’re discussing, is non-linear, first of all.
When I tried to read the Virgin’s Promise, cause I have not finished it, that was the hardest part for me to process was that it was a non-linear stage thing. Like “these stages tend to be present in Heroine’s Journeys,” and the fact that they weren’t in order drove me nuts.
This book made it work for me. The way I see it now is less like, “Hey, here’s a bunch of things that circle around each other,” but “here’s a giant puzzle and the puzzle pieces just go where they go for your particular story.”
The words I’ve wrote down that I pulled from Carriger’s descriptions of what the Hero’s Journey are as contrasted to the Heroine’s Journey are as follows:
The hero’s journey focuses on excitement. Success for the hero often results in isolation or isolation is necessary to achieve it. He’s focused on winning or defeating something in that success. Often he’s motivated by revenge and dominance.
Whereas the heroine’s journey, the primary emotion is comfort. Instead of isolation being a key part of her–the success, and these are non-gendered terms, by the way, we’ll get to that. The heroine is focused on connection. That connection is success for the heroine, and that success will often involve building, connecting, compromise. And she’s often driven by a repair and solidarity.
So setting that up as a framework for this conversation, Carriger gives some really good tips, perhaps a lot of practical tips, which a lot of structure craft books don’t often give these very practical tips.
For example, one that I really like just made things very concrete for me.
If you want to bring your heroine away from their goal, then you separate them from some people, you pull them away from their support structure, the less support they have, the further away from their goal. What are some tips that really jumped out at you or things that from the book that were new and useful for you?
JP: It was the community aspect. I had actually read, I think it’s also called the Heroine’s Journey in 45 Master Characters. And I did not get it at all. I’ve read it and I’m just like, I think I understand the Hero’s Journey. I don’t understand this. So I just kept going with that. It wasn’t until I read this book and I really got what those aspects actually mean. And the practical examples she used in both mythology and then actual cultural references to which, like I understood where the direction of the Heroine’s Journey was going, especially when it involves building a community and actually having an impact on the community around you. Whereas like in the Hero’s Journey, it’s so internal, it’s so much about like personal strength.
This is about holding other people accountable and also building them up.
Christine: And I really like too, how she talks about the ending for the Heroine’s Journey is not one of revenge or victory, but compromise. So I really liked that she pointed that out as well as what happens to the villain is that, usually in a Hero’s Journey, the villain gets their comeuppance and they’re killed, but here it’s more, you don’t have to do that.
You can connect with them. So that’s working towards unification by actually changing the villain and connecting with them. And I really, I liked that aspect as well.
Crys: Yeah. She specifically referred to often there’s a redemption arc for the villain.
Janet: There’s a couple of places in the book that she talks about damaging messages that are usually handled with the Heroine’s Journey. And this is what I really like. There’s a specific passage I’m looking for here. When we’re thinking about romances and how a woman is completed by being coupled with a man, and this is something that she challenges in this book.
So she’s also talking about what it means to be a woman and what women are supposed to want in life. And again, we’re going to talk about gender and we’re going to talk about the female and the male aspects of this, but it’s just challenging. She challenges how we look at even things like comedy, buddy comedies, and cozy romance, cozy mysteries and not just the romance.
So this is something that was a really big takeaway for me.
Marianne: I wasn’t sure if… because she talks about how the Heroine’s Journey uses comedy a lot. And I try to think well can’t the Hero’s Journey also… can’t… I know that they’re depressed and isolated and… I guess they don’t have to be depressed. But it was, it seemed very negative throughout this book, and I thought that there has to be some humor as well in those books too, or in those stories. Because I was just thinking of a lot of different superhero stories that they always throw in the comedy with it.
Listening about the comedy part was just really interesting to me because I have never, with my writing, I have never decided whether or not I would be writing a Hero Story or a Heroine Story. I’ve just written a story and I plotted it out and made sure that it had all of the plot points for it.
And so I guess part of me is wondering, do you have to do either one or do you have to know about this?
Crys: I had the thought as I was reading this, that this is probably not a book that hardcore pantsers will enjoy.
JP: Yeah, I agree. I think to on the topic of how Gail Carriger is approaching the Hero’s Journey, like she’s trying her best to not have a bias, but she’s writing the Heroine’s Journey, and so she is going to have a bias.
She’s going to have to make the Hero’s Journey a trope because the book isn’t about the Hero’s Journey. So really when you shut it down to its core self, it’s the old epic stories from myths and then it’s also what the white guy used to write an epic fantasy.
Those are the things that it’s more geared towards, but Marianne, I think you’re right, that there’s a little bit of a bias towards it and it does come off like, well… I’m pretty sure the Hero’s Journey has these themes in it. So I totally get that.
Marianne: I can also see though there being a bias too, because of the defense of romance. I think that when you start defending a genre, there’s generally an us versus them idea. And so when you’re trying to make your point, it’s hard not to put the other side down, which would be the Hero’s Journey, right?
Wouldn’t that be like an archetype of the Hero’s Journey? Is that in order to defend a genre, it’s hard not to say that something’s wrong with something else.
Crys: I did appreciate that there was a point at which she said that it would be wrong to say that either story type is better than the other or to value one over the other, and she definitely has some defenses in this because she is writing things with humor which can tend to get looked down by critics. She’s writing things with happy endings, which tend to get looked down on by critics. She’s writing romance, which tends to get looked down on by critics. So there is definitely that defensiveness there.
But I didn’t feel like she ever like truly threw the Hero’s Journey in the trash.
Janet: No. Cause I think she does focus on, she talks a lot about the reader expectation and there can be what we think we’re writing, but if we’re ultimately writing for the reader, we have to understand what kind of expectations are coming into it.
So if we decided, not to pick on cozy mysteries, but if we’ve decided we want to read that, then we’re going to expect in the way that she has laid this out, that the heroine is going to ask for help, that she’s going to be working in a network. She’s not going to isolate herself. So to me, it’s about thinking about what the reader wants and what they subconsciously are waiting for to see the foreshadowing that we’re going to put in the story.
Christine: Yeah, and I appreciated her acknowledging how much flexibility there is, that you can start off with a Heroine’s Journey and end up with a Hero’s Journey, or start off with the Hero’s Journey and end up with a Heroine’s Journey. And that the steps are not linear and you may not have them all.
So I do think there was a lot of flexibility, but I do also think that these aren’t the only two story structures you can use. There are several other, at least if not a plethora, of other story structures out there that you can use, but again, it’s just a good tool to have in your toolbox. I think, to be aware of and to help see other stories in a different way that you can use in your own work.
Crys: And I would say that these are specifically Western style story structure, because once you get into Asia, completely different reader expectations.
JP: One of the things I enjoyed that she did was really attacked the gender norms. Even though she totally, she had to use a gender when she was defining like the “she” as the heroine, but then she would always come back around and be like, your hero and your heroine, they’re not male and female, they may not even be binary.
And I really appreciated that because it really attacked the old nomenclature where like the hero is always the male and the woman is always in seek of help. And she just really said how dangerous that kind of commentary can be, and we’re not in that day and age anymore.
Janet: Yeah.
Christine: And I almost felt like that could’ve got pushed even a little bit farther. I know what you just said. I’m not comfortable writing that… I wished that it had been like the “solitary journey” versus the “collective journey” and just gender was taken right out of it. But I know, I understand why she did it cause everyone has the Hero’s Journey kind of drilled into them. So she’s using that as a basis, but yeah, I did appreciate that, but would like to see it pushed even a little bit further away from gender.
Crys: I really liked that one of her largest examples of the Heroine’s Journey was Harry Potter. And even in the different movies, she discussed Men in Black, recognizing that there is a heroine style character and a hero style character in that you can have both in a story and depending on who’s the main character will depend on what journey they’re taking.
My friend and I were talking about this book right before we got on the podcast, I had given them the rundown and he asked, “What’s Buffy? A Hero’s Journey or a Heroine’s Journey?” And so we sat there and for this series, I think it’s the Hero’s Journey.
I think Buffy’s a Hero’s Journey. There are episodes that are more Heroine’s Journey. The series, I think, is a Hero’s Journey. And that is something we can debate endlessly. She picked out some really good examples of, Black Panther specifically, she’s like, I don’t know if it’s a Hero’s Journey or a Heroine’s Journey. I just don’t know.
Marianne: But I do like how Marvel, cause I was thinking about this today, it has the individual like Iron Man, but then it will have the Avengers too. And it’s like it’s straddling a lot of lines and all of the different storytelling that they’re trying to do. But then, the cynic of me is like, hey, I think they’re just happy as long as it sells tickets.
JP: Yeah, I think Wandavision is definitely a Heroine’s Journey. And so if you haven’t seen that you should, because that definitely ends in a compromise and that’s a painful one to watch.
Marianne: Yeah, no. With things that I’ve been watching lately… I yesterday I was just really under the weather and so I was watching a few different films and I would try and decide if I was watching a Hero’s Journey or a Heroine’s Journey. And what was really interesting was if it was a, like a biopic, no… that’s not the right word. If it was a biographical, that sounds like a good a word choice there, film or not.
Crys: You were right on biopic. That is a biopic.
Marianne: Yes, but sometimes it’s interesting because when you have a movie that’s about just one specific person, sometimes it’s interesting to delve into whether or not it fits into either or if it just switches back and forth.
Crys: Yeah. And then with the epics, with the big epics that don’t have one main character, she used Game of Thrones as an example, there are multiple plot lines and some are Hero’s Journey plot lines and some are Heroine’s Journey plot lines.
But I don’t know, I never finished that. So I don’t know if there’s like one that takes precedence or not.
Janet: I think that the Heroine’s Journey is just relevant to the time that we’re in. During a pandemic, we want happy endings. I think we’re going to see more of these kinds of stories because they’re about connections, are about finding family, just all the positive messaging.
There’s still going to be a need for the Hero’s Journey. But I just think right now that we want to hear about civilization going forward. We want to have everyone sharing their power and that balance that we talked about, the compromise, the good for all. So…
JP: As I was reading this, I had something like crazily click in my head because one of my values that I’m trying to propagate more is to tell more LGBTQI characters, to tell more of those stories. And as I was reading this, I realized that 90% of the content with LGBTQI characters is Heroine’s Journey.
Especially when you go into the aspect of a person who comes out. Because if we follow down the line, the death is generally when someone comes out, the expectations that the family had imposed on them makes that identity that was previously existent dead. And then more or less, most of the stories that are told in a media, the character, the person gets kicked out of their family because the family’s not accepting.
Then they end up in this underground, which is this group of unaccepted individuals. They are fighting and finding their identity. They’re finding a new family and then they’re growing and learning from it.
As I was reading this, I was putting all the pieces together. I felt like a crazy person. And I’m like, I think I have found my structure that I’m going to use as a main platform. So I just really resonated with this one.
Janet: Sacha Black actually interviewed Gail on the Rebel Author Podcast. She talks specifically about that. Like the “I don’t know who I am” is something that the character having to let go of what everyone else has thought she should be by society standards.
Yeah. I love that too. I love that too, because that’s what my stories are about as well.
Marianne: Yeah. No, looking at it, all of my stories, they have to have friends in order for them to achieve their goals. But the one that I think I wrote it’s called Better Off Divorced, and she has to decide about whether or not she’s better off divorced. There’s a great title wrap there.
But but she does that with other people and with the help of other people. And I think at least for me, I can’t make decisions very easily unless I say it out loud to someone and then it makes it real as well.
Crys: I said earlier that this was, I don’t know if I said “better” or not, but this is the kind of story that I really like to tell. And I wrote the list of stories that she used as examples in my notebook and two columns of the ones that I liked. And she’s got a great reference list in the back.
And my Heroine’s Journey is a little bit longer than my Hero’s Journey, but I consume both happily. Deadpool’s one of my favorite, just, goofy movies ever. Like, strict Hero’s Journey there. Diehard, that’s my Christmas movie, strict Hero’s Journey. But the stories I like to write for the Heroine’s Journey, I like the stories about connection. I like the stories about comfort. And it really actually gave me insight into the characters that I have trouble with because I often write introverts because that is what I am familiar with. At least as my main like focal characters. And they are very easily wrongly written isolated. By me. When I, as an introvert… I am extremely connected.
I am extremely linked to my networks, to my found family. And it gave me an insight into what some of my characters had been lacking.
Any other thoughts that stood out?
Christine: One of the tips that she had that I will definitely use going forward was when she talked about searching your sub genre. The reviews, the good reviews for key emotion words, to see if you’re really hitting your audience.
And I love that. I actually went through and did that for my books. I tend to write Hero’s Journeys that turn into Heroine’s Journey, now that I’m looking at it from disconnected to connected, and it was really eye opening for me just to see the emotion words that popped up again and again in the reviews and to say, okay, I can see what my audience wants.
So am I hitting those points in my own work? So I thought that was a really useful tip.
Marianne: And I’m just trying to make sure that I hit the fact that I tell people who killed the person.
And I did think it was interesting though, that the genres that she put in this, I have never thought about them that way. But it is hard, we use heroine to not assign it as male, female. It is so hard not to do that. At least for me.
Crys: I would agree with that. I think one of the things, looking at those lists that I read out of what is the Hero’s Journey and what is the Heroine’s Journey, she says, somewhere in the middle, that what we’re not doing here is trying to define different styles of journeys. But what we’re trying to do here is redefine strength as multiple different kinds of things, the Hero’s Journey emphasizes one kind of strength, the Heroine’s Journey emphasizes a different kind of strength, and they’re both needed.
And we need stories of these everywhere.
Marianne: Do you think that we need to analyze it like this though?
Crys: Nobody needs to analyze.
Marianne: No, but what I mean is, in order for those voices to truly be heard, does it need to be pointed out that they’re following these journeys? Like did Joseph Campbell… do we need to know the Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Journey?
Does that make sense, what I’m asking?
JP: I think for me, it’s good knowing because if I’m 70% through an outline or 70% through a first draft and all of a sudden I’ve hit a stop point, I need to look back. And for me, knowing what that structure is, it helps me know what I need to do to move forward.
It also would help in determining whether or not I would be betraying my readership by completely diverting and going in a completely different direction that they’re not expecting because some changes, nice. You can change a few things on a Reuben, but the moment you change everything, it’s no longer the same sandwich.
You can’t just completely be off the rails. Maybe someone can, but I think that I like having that kind of structure just to know what direction I need to go.
Janet: Yeah, know your basics, you have to know, at least your three acts, where you need to go.
Crys: I have friends who have never read a craft book in their life and they write beautiful stories. A lot of people are very happily writing intuitively and not examining things in this way.
I just happen to not be one of them. I am the kind of person who’s like, show me all the kinds of puzzles I can make and I will make my own. I want to know how the bread is made. I want to know the chemical reaction that happens to make the emotion buttons fire in your brain, because that is not intuitive for me.
And this actually may be a part where you personally are having trouble with this, Marianne, is that you, in the Clifton Strengths, are number one Empath. You get emotions intuitively.
And so you get a lot of this structure kind of stuff. Because story is emotion plus change or change plus emotion, whichever direction you want to put that. There’s a lot of stuff that you personally get really intuitively that I do not. And I have to figure out how to take people apart and put them back together and manipulate them through words.
You know that. You know how to do that. You don’t know how you know it, you just do.
Marianne: I was thinking like, if there was never the diagram of the Hero Story put out there or the Heroine Story put out there, would we still have the same amount of the two that we do today. Does that make sense?
I think that it just depends on how you write and how you read it. If it is helpful to have those analysis-es there… analyses? Anyway. See, you can be a writer without actually knowing correct words. Yes.
JP: That’s why you have editors.
Marianne: There’s apps for that. And so it’s just curious to me if things can be innate or not, and I think it’s a person by person.
Crys: I absolutely think they can be innate. And I don’t think that these story structures that we’re talking about, the Hero’s Journey I know specifically Campbell said, these are things that already exist. I’m just putting it into definable words.
And I think that’s very similar to what Carriger was doing. Her first three examples of the Heroine’s Journey are old myths saying like this isn’t anything new, this has been around, we’re just picking it apart and figuring it out. Like we’re figuring out the double helix structure of the DNA strands of story.
Does the body still work if we don’t know what DNA is? Absolutely.
JP: I wonder if JK Rowling or Suzanne Collins actually knew that they were writing a Heroine’s Journeys when they wrote Harry Potter or The Hunger Games respectively. They may not have.
I think that the fact is that both the Hero and the Heroine’s Journeys are both like intuitive structures. It’s just putting it down in words for people who need that to lay out in front of them.
Crys: Like George Lucas, he wrote Star Wars to be the Hero’s Journey, like point for point, like that’s a story that was written with knowledge. Harry Potter, probably not written with that knowledge.
Marianne: What did she say? That in the Heroine’s Journey, she said that the women often, or the heroine, I apologize again, will often put down churches or they will build structures. Were there other structures that she mentioned besides churches?
Christine: She was talking about temples. Yeah. But I kept thinking, Oh, they just go around, if it was now, it would be just like dropping a community center.
You guys come here and make your community and you come here and network. But yeah, that was interesting.
JP: And I think too, like obviously the myths are creating physical representations either through civilization or through these buildings, but in your stories, it would just be giving people the agency to build their own communities.
I think that’s the key piece there, is to kinda give other people their shine, their moment and their spotlight so that they can become the heroes or the heroines with their own stories.
Janet: And if you pick up this book as a craft book, and you’re blocked somewhere, it still comes back to the structure. At least you can go back to the basics and go what should I be doing here?
Because if I haven’t, you’ve already covered this, Crys and Marianne, either you intuitively know it or you don’t and this is a craft book.
And if you want to know I’m just stuck. Where do I go? Then the beats are going to be laid out for you.
Marianne: Why do you think there was a staircase on the cover?
Crys: Ascending. The descending and ascending.
JP: Boom.
Marianne: It made me curious.
Crys: Sometimes I have smart thoughts.
Marianne: I know that as an author, she may not have had any input into that, but I still wanted to know, why would an editor or anybody–
Crys: I actually think she self-published this book.
Marianne: Oh, did she?
Crys: I do believe she self-published this book. She self-publishes her gay romance.
I think it’s the ascending and descending.
Something we should have said at the beginning, but I was listening to audio, so I didn’t have the visual in my brain. Like, you know how when you read things and you can see where they are on the page? I did not have that cause it was earlier on in the book.
But the three kind of main stages and then she has different plot points that often happen in the Heroine’s Journey underneath that were the Ascent, the Search, I think was the other one? And then… or Descent, Search, Ascent. With Descent being loss, Search being like figuring things out and building things, and Ascent being that return to community. From disconnected to connected as Christine so lovely put it.
All right. So we did decide on the book for next week [month].
JP: It is a long title with a lot of parentheses and subtext. So the title is… Your Brand Should be Gay, Even if You’re Not: The Art and Science of Creating an Authentic Brand.
It’s by Re Perez.
Crys: All right. So we will be back next month.
We will be having an opportunity for you to join us for book club next month, more details to follow. We will definitely be talking about it in the weeks to come.
Leave a Reply