Archtype Articles

About ten years ago I did a series of blog posts about character archetypes, based on types presented in the book The Complete Writer’s Guide to Heroes and Heroines. If you’re interested in finding a copy of this book, here’s the Amazon link.

This series turned out to be one of the most popular things I’ve done on my blog, so here are these posts, edited to make sense and compiled for easy reference. This was mostly written in the summer of 2007, and I haven’t updated verb tenses for character examples from TV series that have since ended, and some series moved on to do different things with these characters, so this may be based on early seasons. I’ve mostly updated the parts that apply to my books.

Archetypes and Lost Souls

Some of the hero archetypes tend to be overused, especially in romance and chick lit, and others underused. I suspect that a lot of this has to do with authors not really understanding how the archetypes work and veering dangerously close to stereotype. Really, an archetype relates to WHY a person does something more than […]

Archetypes and the Best Friend

One neglected and misused archetype is what the book The Complete Writer’s Guide to Heroes and Heroines calls the Best Friend. This is also sometimes called the beta male, but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. This character is driven by loyalty and a need for harmony. He’s the mediator and peacemaker, and he’s the person you […]

Archetypes: What vs. Why

A few years ago, I went to a seminar with one of the authors of that book I keep referencing, and there were some group activities where we were supposed to create characters based on archetypes. I found the exercises somewhat confusing, because the whole seminar was supposedly about how it was the motivation that […]

Internal vs. External Archetypes

I’ve noticed how easily audiences can fall into stereotypes when assessing characters, so that they misread who the characters really are — considering that people writing a book on the subject managed to misclassify Harry Potter when that one seems really obvious to me. There are some types that are often confused with each other. […]

Goals, Needs, and Motivations

I’ve said that the archetypes are about why someone does something, which sounds like motivation, but it works on an entirely different level. A character usually has some kind of goal, and most of the time, the character is aware of that goal. There’s also a motivation, the reason why the character wants that goal, […]

Evolving Archetypes

I mentioned back when I was talking about the difference between a story goal and the kind of deep-seated need that defines an archetype that while the goal may be achieved, the archetype need will always be there — unless the character goes through so profound an experience that he/she actually evolves from one archetype […]

Archetypes and Gender

According to this book, there are hero archetypes and heroine archetypes. In some cases, there are types that match each other pretty well. There’s the female Boss who’s the equivalent of the male Chief, the female Spunky Kid who maps to the male Best Friend, the male Charmer who’s like the female Seductress, the male […]

Archetypes and Character Complexity

Characters are not real people. This kind of classification system only works on fictional characters. It doesn’t really apply to real people. Yeah, you may notice some traits or even patterns of traits in real people, but it’s nearly impossible to truly classify a real person according to archetype because real people are more complex […]

Layered Archetypes

I said previously that, for the most part, it’s best to pick one archetype and stick with it as a focus because using multiple archetypes usually dilutes the character. There are a few exceptions where a character may represent multiple archetypes. One is the Doctor on Doctor Who (someone asked me to analyze that characterization). […]

Enchanted, Inc. Archetypes: Katie

Since I’ve been discussing archetypes, I’ve been focused on just that aspect of characterization, which can make it sound like that’s all there is to it, but it’s really just a starting point. An important disclaimer goes here: this is what works for me. It is not the absolute, only way to do this. Other […]

Enchanted, Inc. Archetypes: Owen

Owen was kind of an accidental character who was largely shaped by the archetype I assigned to him. One thing I do before I start writing a book is figure out what the cast will be. I may look at the functional archetypes as in the Joseph Campbell mythological structure, and that’s a good starting […]