Character Archetypes

Creating a character from scratch can feel like a daunting task. Who are they? What do they look like? What do they believe? What are their needs/wants/motivations/fears/flaws? So much to consider to create a character with depth and enough life where their decisions within your story are believable. That’s where character archetypes come in. They act as a guide, a blueprint, a uh archetype, for building a character that fits your narrative and genre. A simple google search will bring up a million articles outlining all the variations and types, but if you boil it down there are about eight (originating from Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and Carl Jung’s Jungian archetypes). Most times you’ll see twelve but this is just a refinement or splitting of the original eight.

Whether you’re writing a hero or warrior, a trickster, a child/innocent, or a mentor character, archetypes are a great way to identify basic behavioral traits of those characters. A little mix and matching doesn’t hurt to make them unique, and once refined with characterization and dropped into your world you’ll have a living, breathing, character that’ll make decisions fit to the world you’ve built.

In the latest Writer Syndrome episode Tim and I get into the weeds of the various character archetypes with examples, and discuss how we did or didn’t use them with our first novels.