Inside the Wonder World Lesson 25

Archetypes

Welcome to my Friday edition of Substack, which features my paid posts: Inside the Wonder World.

Those paid subscribers who stick with me for a year will get a free copy of the book as soon as it’s out.

Inside the Wonder World is the working title of my developing craft book on writing and publishing for young readers. I’m bringing it to you in pieces, both to help you learn something more deeply (lessons and exercises included) and to push me to finish this lofty goal.

Here’s the next lesson!

What Are Archetypes?

Joseph Campbell, in his classic work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, was one of the first to recognize that, throughout civilization and across cultures, myths carry certain similarities. Campbell tracked what he called “the hero’s journey”, which has become one of the defining paradigms for story structure (as I’ll discuss in the plot section to come).

Craft writer and author Christopher Vogler wrote The Writer’s Journey as an extension of Campbell’s work, refining the hero’s journey to mirror plot points, and cataloguing the kinds of characters who inhabit most story worlds, again, across cultures. Basing his observations on the work of psychologist Carl Jung, Vogler used Jung’s term “archetypes”; in Volger’s words, “meaning ancient patterns of personality that are the shared heritage of the human race”.

The concept of archetypes is a useful tool to writers, as we can think about characters who perform what are identifiable roles in story. As a caveat, it can be awfully easy to create these archetypal characters as “flat” – that is, too two-dimensional – but understanding archetypes is important, and you will encounter the roles and names again and again in discussion of character in this and other writing craft books.

And as another caveat, not all of these archetypes will appear in every story. The essential two are the hero and shadow, but the others may be present as forces of nature or elements within the hero or not present at all.