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Avg. Rating: 4.5
A very helpful resource
I enjoy creating characters, but I've always had problems not defining them enough. When I first saw this book, I thought it would help me in my character creation process. The moment I started flipping through the pages, my thoughts were affirmed.
Victoria Lynn Schmidt delves into many archetypes of characters that have come up in history, literature and film, and shows the traits that make up each universal archetype. I was also blown away at how she gives suggestions on how they would play off other character archetypes. For example, the Warlock would make for a great adversary for the Male Messiah (seeing this put pieces together for my latest story).
She also goes into depth on the masculine and feminine journeys, and how each acts and reacts to conflicts. This pattern can really help with setting an underlying structure for a story if you don't know where to go next.
I definitely consider this book to be a valuable asset to a writer's collection of resources.
Decent book to have around for writers interested in myth
This book just about lives up to its title. As you might expect it lists lots of archetypal character models to get you thinking about how you might want to develop your own characters. One of the spotlight reviews above lists exactly what these are.
There are a few caveats to the methodology of this book. Firstly, the author is writing from a point of view engrained in many psychology theories, but rarely, if it all appropriately cites where she got these views. One surprising example to me was when she listed Maslow's hierarchy of needs (as a character motivation consideration) and cited it as coming from another book about writing instead of the man who invented the theory!
Secondly, she suggests in the beginning of the book that an archetype isn't a stereotype, but doesn't back that up. In my opinion an archeype is a stereotype, so you should be very careful in only thinking of these things in terms of starting point inspiration and not as copy and paste character types. The book is a bit slim on creative exercises, and usually asks the same questions about every archetype, like "What does your character fear?" that do little to spark your imagination.
However, as a book strictly with some fun ideas about how to see myths, fantasy tales, and epics and the characters that might surround them, this book is really a great idea. I think she captured in small detail a great variety of archetypes, and the real disappointment is that she didn't include lots of classical story excerpts in the same volume. You could do much worse than to keep a book like this around, just don't expect it to do your dreaming and truth searching for you.
USING ARCHETYPES BEATS STARTING WITH A BLANK PAGE
45 MASTER CHARACTERS, by Victoria Lynn Schmidt, explains the value of archetype characters, and why authors should study and use them. Heroes, villains, and support characters are outlined, as well as journeys for both male and female characters. Far from cookie-cutter writing, this book explores the use of archetypes as a springboard for injecting new life into fiction. This approach to beefing-up characters absolutely beats starting with a blank page.
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