So, I talked a few weeks ago about character motivations and how they should influence and impact the shape of a story, and earlier than that I spoke on how you as the author give a character agency, but before you think about character agency and motivations you should… maybe… have characters?
Building a character is an incredibly difficult part of any writing experience, even if you are just rolling some dice to get some stats. In any narrative work, having believable characters can make or break a production. Even in Science-Fiction and Fantasy, where, by all accounts, your entire cast could be non-human, if they don’t act and behave in recognizably human ways, that puts off an audience. Now, that could be your intention, and we’ll get into that a bit today, but there should be at least one character that your audience should be able to relate to and recognize their own experiences in.
But your characters also need to serve a function. From a strictly Doylist view, all characters are just people that plot happens to. Their function within the story can be categorized, and this is where archetypes come in. A character archetype is simply a category of character which describes the role that the character plays within the story. And with any category there are sub-categories and exceptions, but as with any type of categories, these are broad strokes. There is also the mistake that some writers make in that they start with the archetype and then never go anywhere with it. An archetype isn’t a character, it’s simply their function within the story. You have to give your character a personality and motivation and agency beyond their archetype to make them interesting.
So why use archetypes? Well, because it’s a pattern that you can follow. It’s a way to build your story and your character before you have a clear idea as to what your story and your character is. I mean, you probably have a good guy and a bad guy, they have a fight, Triangle wins. Triangle man.
(Also this is part one because there are far more archetypes than I’m going to list here, but here are a few to start out with.)
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04/21/2018
What are Character Archetypes? (part two)
valeriemclean1919 character archetypes, characters, heroes, mentors, rivals, tricksters, villains, Writing About Writing 0 Comments
Part two of an ongoing series. Read part one here!
Last time I wrote about character archetypes, I looked at specific archetypes pertaining to heroes and villains– the most common characters in fiction. This week we’ll be stepping away from that a bit, though still talking about major and plot-important characters. Because as important as your main protagonistic force and your main antagonistic force are, it’s often necessary to populate the story around those two forces. More often than not, however, these characters often come off as more functional characters than fully rounded characters.
There will be times when you have to have a functional character. Sometimes you need someone to give out exposition or technobabble and there’s not enough time to give them a personality. However, the closer the character is to your protagonist, the more rounded the character should be. Horatio has motivations and fully realized relationships, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, not so much. At least, until they do. A comic relief character can work very well, but if they’re the best friend of the main character and show up in several scenes, they’re going to seem rather one note.
These character archetypes can often come off as one note, as it is either particularly easy to write them as a purely functional character, or it is particularly difficult to properly write them. As you’re thinking about these archetypes, think about how they relate to your protagonist and antagonist, and what might make their relationships to the other characters more complex and realistic.
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