From Chronological to Spiral Structure — Why and How

By Jillian Barnet

Two years into writing my memoir, I felt as if I were wearing someone else’s itchy, ill-fitting clothes. I’d followed a chronological, hero’s journey structure: the protagonist pursues a quest, faces challenges, gains insights, and, at the end of three tidy acts, returns transformed. In The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, by Christopher Vogler and the more feminist version, Kim Hudson’s The Virgin’s Promise, I’d read that this classic scaffold would keep m...