The Writer’s Journey, Series #1, Archetypes – Main Characters

As promised, here is the first installment of my series on The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler and all the various insights he presents, along with my thoughts and ideas about stories and writing.  If I were ambitious enough to give each chapter of the book its own blog post (which one could legitimately do), I would be doing 26 posts in this series, and it would take 6 months to complete.  I have decided against such a vast commitment of time and will be combining chapters here and there for a total of 13 posts (to be written over the course of about 3 months rather than 6) divided into 3 series:  Archetypes, The Hero’s Journey, and Essentials for the Journey.

Archetypes – Main Characters

(series 1 of 3, post 1 of 3)

Today’s installment is the first of three in the Archetypes series:  Main Characters.  These are the main forces that will be present in any story.  They do not necessarily have to be represented as individual characters, though 9 times out of 10 they do appear as characters.  This, I think, is because of the strength of these forces.  These are the forces that create the plot.  Without these Archetypes, there is no tension and thus no real plot.  I am making the argument here (and I think most storytellers will agree) that plot requires tension.  If there is no tension there is no plot.  There may be a string of events plodding along one after the other and they may together create a timeline that someone could call a story, but I don’t expect it will be a very interesting story.

Hero/Protagonist

The first of these main characters is, obviously, the Hero.  Christopher Vogler makes the distinction that the Hero figure represents Freud’s Ego, which is the conscious self.  As such, this character begins as part of the normal whole, and through the Journey separates from the normal whole to become a separate individual, distinct from the normal whole.  Vogler goes on to say that the basic premise of the Hero’s Journey is the search for self identity and a sense of “wholeness”.  This is usually the character who changes the most in the story, or who has the most to lose, or both.  This character will be complex, face death, make some kind of sacrifice (possibly in relation to facing death), and will be flawed.  Vogler also discusses various kinds of Heroes from willing to unwilling, loner to group, and more.  Exactly which type of Hero you use will depend on your story’s needs, and your personal preferences.

The Hero is also usually the character your readers will relate to the most, which is why the Hero is the one with the biggest identity crisis or identity challenge.  The best example I can think of for this is in the recent movie Rango, where the lizard doesn’t even know his own name until he ends up in this small wild west town where he has to pretend to have a reputation to avoid misfortune.  He invents his entire past in just a few minutes and creates an identity that he will be challenged to live up to later in the story.  We all feel out of place at least some of the time (if not most of the time) and rarely do we feel that we truly belong somewhere.  We are painfully aware of our quirks and oddities and we struggle to find a group of people to call friends who are like-minded and who possibly even have similar oddities to ourselves.  This is why this character is most often the protagonist.  You want your protagonist to be the one your readers can relate to best, so that the entire story will remain interesting to your readers.

Shadow/Antagonist

This is the force opposite to the Hero, and Vogler immediately pegs it as an initially internal force, represented psychologically by the things we repress inside ourselves, “the dark secrets we can’t admit, even to ourselves”.  These are things like guilt, envy, feelings of lack, feelings of loss, severe trauma, etc.  Usually, these things are represented in an external villain or antagonist of some kind who opposes the Hero outright.  This opposition becomes the main source of tension in the story.  Vogler also makes the point that the Shadow doesn’t have to be evil, rather it’s more like the Shadow is working on his/her own quest or Journey and it just so happens that our Hero is in direct opposition to the Shadow’s goals.  Only one of the two can achieve victory, for there is no way to reconcile their opposing desires.

In Rango, to continue the example I started using above, there are two such shadows.  The external Shadow is the mayor, who is buying up all the land with plans to build a modern city that will make him a huge profit, but the internal Shadow is Rango’s own doubts about himself, his lack of belief in himself and his own certainty that he has no identity.  It’s not until after he overcomes those internal Shadows and discovers his identity that he has the ability to overcome the external Shadow and foil the mayor’s plans.

Mentor/Guide

The Hero cannot become what he/she needs to be without the Mentor.  Vogler calls the Mentor the psychological Self, which is the part of us that is our best, wisest, purest, etc.  This is usually a character, but could also manifest as a book, the Hero’s conscience, or other non-character forces.  The primary function of the Mentor is to prepare the Hero for the inevitable confrontation with the Shadow.  This will include giving the Hero gifts, protection, and lessons.

This may have something to do with me being a teacher, but I find Mentor characters the most fun to write and do different things with.  They can be willing or unwilling, good or evil, Shadows in disguise, or gods in disguise, and an infinite number of other possibilities.  The Mentor colors and shapes the Hero’s understanding the world beyond that normal place where the Hero began and shows the Hero how to face the Shadow – if that Mentor turns out to be corrupt, what will the Hero do then?  In Rango, there are two Mentor figures that spring readily to mind.  One is the Armadillo that tries to cross the highway and the other is the Spirit of the West that the lizard meets while on his quest to find his identity.  Each one only appears briefly, gives the advice that’s needed, and then moves on.  Of course, you could also have a Mentor who stays with the Hero too long and works with the Hero too much, and explore how that would help and hinder the Hero in different ways.

What do you think?

What are some of your favorite stories and who or what takes on these roles in those stories?  Can you think of any stories that lack a Hero, Shadow, or Mentor?  Leave a comment with your thoughts!

Coming Soon:  Archetypes – Secondary Characters, series 1 of 3, post 2 of 3

Writer, Killer, Character, Reader

Today I had lunch with a good friend who had just finished rereading the manuscript I’ve been working on.  She loved nearly all of it and when she did make suggestions about what to change, she was so passionate about them, I knew I had written something that connected to her on an emotional level.  She is as excited about this story as I am, if not more.

So where’s the ‘but’?  Well, it’s here:  The things that need to change the most are all related to the depth of the characters and making it feel like they are fully-rounded people instead of stereotypes.  The more we talked about the experiences these characters were having and the emotions that needed to be shown, the more I realized I had cheated my characters.

You can’t write a depressed or insecure character unless you can grasp the feeling of depression or insecurity within yourself and describe it in maximum detail.  This usually means dredging up painful memories and past experiences, reshaping them into the experiences of your characters, and then living those new experiences with your character moment by moment, recording everything that happens.  It’s one part acting, one part journalism, and one part creative fiction.

I think that in all good fiction someone is always in some kind of pain in every scene, whether it’s a life-threatening wound, or unrequited love.  Someone has to be hurting about something.  I cheated my characters in that I hadn’t been willing to write the painful emotions, and thus I had cheated them out of fully living.

I continued mulling this over all afternoon and into the evening and tried to start pulling up some of those memories of some of those experiences so that I could start really getting into the hearts of my characters instead of just inside their heads, and I hit a block.  It felt like I was killing something in the process of my catharsis, and at first I thought it was the earlier version of my characters (out with the old and in with the new), but the more I considered every angle, the more I felt that this feeling of death had nothing to do with my characters and everything to do with me.

You see, in order to get back into those old memories of mine, I first have to break through the psychological wall I’ve put up to protect myself from those memories.  I don’t need to go leaping headlong into some painful feeling, but I do have to be willing to at least dip my toes in to remind myself what temperature the water is, and even that much can be difficult.

And here is the incredible philosophical discovery I arrived at:  When I write in such a way that I take pieces of my deepest soul, where I locked away all those most painful memories, and display those emotions in profound detail in my characters, readers will connect to that.  In a way, it’s like my readers and I will have connected to each other through my characters and the emotions we all share among ourselves.  Isn’t that amazing?

It’s one thing to teach a class and be at the front of a crowd, giving instruction in what is actually a rather distant relationship.  It’s another thing entirely to be the one a reader connects to when she is curled up in her bed, at home with the flu, enjoying the story you’ve created.  That scenario of the relationship between reader and writer is so much more intimate, in its own way, because of the emotional closeness.  Physical distance means nothing.  Having that emotion spread out before you in painstaking detail means everything.

And now I want to go back through my manuscript and edit for emotional impact, make sure that every sentence, every moment, every letter, packs a tense punch to the emotional stomach of every reader.  So, I will leave you with these thoughts and go type some more on something that I hope will one day connect to readers all over the world.

Writing As a Career – the First Steps

This week is my first week back teaching and you’d think that the reason they have the teachers come back a week earlier than the students is so that we can prepare for the students, but really it’s so that they can take up all our time with meetings and not give us any time to prepare anything.  At least, that’s what it feels like this close to “zero hour”.

Anyway, I decided to make this week’s post simple.  Here is a list of things I did when I decided that I wanted to make writing my next career:

1. Decide to treat writing like a career (if I was willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on my bachelors degree in classics, I should also be willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on conferences, books, etc. to further my career in writing)
2. Read books about how to write (do the suggested writing exercises, and practice)
3. Read books that are similar to your manuscript (don’t steal, be creative, come up with new twists/ideas)
4. Join a writer’s association (it’s expensive, but it’s worth it, even if all you get out of it is the ability to say you belong to one)
5. Go to a writer conference (it’s expensive, but it’s worth it, especially if you meet an agent)
6. Join a writing circle (and attend!  Get feedback.  Give feedback.  Be brutally honest and learn how to gracefully accept the brutal honesty of others.)
7. WRITE! (start typing.  Now.)

Sleepless Rambling About Impossible Wishes

So I couldn’t sleep and I had this story idea flitting around in my head and decided to write it out and get it out of my head and figured that might help me sleep.  The characters are based on people I know in real life and in the story, one character does something for another that is absolutely wonderful and needed but could never happen in the real world.  It made me sad.  I’ve never wanted so badly to do something for someone that was so impossible.  I thought about making it impossible in the story as well, but my thing about writing is that I have to live in and live with the real world, while  I can create whatever kind of world I want in the stories I write and I can make whatever I want real there – so why ever do things the same way they are in reality when I don’t have to?  Of course, with that kind of attitude, you can cheapen a story easily by not forcing a character to go through something they don’t want to go through but need to and giving them what they want but don’t need instead.  Right now this particular story is just a pair of scenes and a handful of back story notes, but I want to see it happen in real life instead of just on paper in a fantasy adventure story.

And that’s why I want to write books that are eventually published worldwide.  If I can capture that impossible wish, wrap it up, and present it to the world as a story, someone somewhere will read that and get inspired by it and maybe that someone will have the right talent and skill and training to make that impossible wish into something possible.

There is so much power in the written word:  to make people think, to make people dream, to make people hate someone, love something, or believe in things they can’t see.  Through the written word, others have changed the world.  Of course, it also depends on how the world interprets what you write, and there’s no way to control that.  But there is something to be said for trying.  And if I never try or if I ever stop trying, I’ll never know what impossible wishes someone could have made possible because of something I never wrote.

Someday all the things we once thought were entirely impossible will be things we take for granted as part of a daily routine.

Writing Exercise 01

So I’ve started jump-starting my brain by doing this writing exercise where I go to a random word generator (http://watchout4snakes.com/CreativityTools/RandomWord/RandomWord.aspx) and use an online timer (http://www.online-stopwatch.com/) to give myself ten minutes to freewrite about the first random word I get without actually using that random word.  One of these exercises from the other day gave  me the word “Review” and this is what I wrote about it:

“Now take your papers home,” Mr. Vanderbilt announced, “and look them over.  Find the red marks I made and see of you can figure out how to fix them.”

Sarah glanced over the typed essay, counting the violent red scribbles tucked neatly into the double-spacing.  She took it home and examined every crimson stroke with care.

There were a few that had easy solutions like commas and new paragraphs, but there was one in particular that she didn’t know how to resolve.  This series of red marks consisted of a parentheses encircling a portion of a sentence with a single word written above:  expand.

Sarah tried to stretch the words out, but instead of oozing into more words, they broke into senseless piles of letters.  She tried stretching her brain around the words, but that only gave her a headache.  Finally, Sarah looked at the empty spaces between the words and stretched those out.  It took some time, but gradually, she began to find extra words stuck to the edges.  Sarah pried these off with her pen and placed them carefully into her sentences.

When she gave the paper back to Mr. Vanderbilt, she smiled and said, “I didn’t know it was possible to make something out of nothing, but now I’ve done it!”

Mr. Vanderbilt smiled too.