Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #123876 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 300 pages

Synopsis
All fiction writers want to write stories with great heroes and heroines -- characters who leap off the page and capture the reader's imagination. Heroic characters can be broken down into sixteen archetypes. By following the guidelines of the archetypes presented in this comprehensive reference work, writers can create extraordinarily memorable characters and elevate their writing to a higher level. Throughout the book, the authors give examples of well-known heroes and heroines from television and film so the reader can picture the archetype in his or her mind. At the very core of a character, every hero can be traced back to one of eight molar archetypes, as can every heroine. The core archetype tells the writer the most basic instincts of heroes or heroines -- how they think and feel, what drives them and how they reach their goals. Whether you are a seasoned professional or a novice, this book will help you to improve your own writing and help you to create truly unforgettable characters.

Customer Reviews

A sometimes useful tool but incomplete
I was skeptical about this - archetypes seemed to akin to stereotypes. I bought this book largely because I read good reviews on the US Amazon.com. I've worked with this book, and yes, it helps create strong characters. To my amazement, I discovered that the main protagonists in my current Work in Progress are the 'librarian' and the 'swashbuckler' respectively - they fit the description, yet I'm sure they're not stereotypes, far from it. I used the book to just bring out certain characteristics more, and found it useful for creating extra tension for scenes which had previously lacked sparkle. The description of main archetypes is good, and useful. The bit about how they interact is weak, shallow, incomplete. The authors have not bothered to show the interaction between each of their 16 archetypes, they've just picked them at random. So when I wanted inspiration for how my heroine (Librarian)interacts with the Queen (Boss I drew a blank, although I could find how she interacts with her servant (Spunky Kid). Surely the three authors between them could have undertaken the work and written about ALL the interactions? It would have added some pages to to the book, but not all that much more. As it is, I felt a bit cheated there. I am glad that the authors emphasise that you should use the archetypes only as a basis and inspiration and flesh them out according to your own ideas and experience, not as bland stereotypes. But the publicity claim that all characters can be broken down into 16 archetypes is just not true. The authors make a feeble effort at the end to prove this claim, but fail abysmally. They list well-known plays, films, novels and legends and state which characters belong to which archetype. But for most of them they manage to find only one protagonist who corresponds with their archetypes, which, I think, disproves the publicity claims. In the whole Bible (old Testament) they managed to find only two archetypes according to their definition: Ruth (Nurturer) and Cain (Lost Soul). Only Healthcliff qualifies inWuthering Heights (lost Soul) and only Juliet (Waif) in Romeo and Juliet. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, so full of memorable characters, has only one of their archetypes in Vronsky (charmer). And so on. It's a useful tool for character building; just don't expect too much of it. I'm glad to have it; where it works it works well, but much of the time it doesn't.