Others say...

"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.


"Some People May Interpret This Book as Feminist"
...but it's the kind of feminism that makes people who believe that feminism is actually about *equality* between the sexes shudder.

Despite the book's frequent pseudofeministic usage of "she" as a default neutral pronoun and lipservice given to the idea of employing "gender bending" in one's character creation, at its core this book lays out all of its advice on character creation and development based on biased, and, frankly, offensive gender stereotypes and roles. At one point the author actually states that the "myth" of women being able to have a career, a marriage, and children is being dispelled. I'm sorry...what?

The two plot outlines she provides for characters are unnecessarily genderized, when really the major difference in how the stories play out is whether the character in question is the sort to resist change or to seek it. Which is clearly something that has nothing to do with what sexual organs they have. Throughout, her basic standpoint is that men are inherently more egotistical and thus have stronger senses of self than women who, because of their lack of firm identity (which they must discover by embracing their power), are better able to sympathize with others. This is most obvious later in the book in the sections about the differences between the "feminine" and "masculine" journeys and also when one compares the archetypes for the male and female Messiah. These two archetypes are almost identical, except in instances where the Male Messiah is basically portrayed as being stronger and appealing to their potential followers through force of personality and belief that they are the path to the divine, while the Female Messiah is left to lead by example and appeal to the desire to achieve her perfect level of spirituality and oneness with the universe. The only flaw the Female Messiah has the Male Messiah does not is that she doubts. So, basically, the Male Messiah can be forceful and confident because he is actually enlightened, whereas the Female Messiah is really just a passive vessel for the divine, something of which she doesn't truly understand the scope; she just has some vague sense that she is somehow important.

The terrible thing is that I believe that the writer is actually quite biased towards the *female*, because of the way that all of the characteristics she attributes to males are generally unpleasant (egotistical, overbearing, unsympathetic, etc.). Sadly, presenting women as inherently more perfect, more pure, more peaceful, more at one with the Earth or whatever else than men is just as offensive to the thinking person as the belief that women are inherently inferior. Women are people. Period. Good and bad and inbetween and feminism starts with the understanding that a female is, inherently, no better or worse than a male.

So, I don't know about anyone else, but I, personally, found reading this book quite incensing and dislike the book a lot based solely on what I've just described above.

However, besides my political differences with the author, on a technical level I also found this book lacking in many ways. Far too much time is spent prose-ifying about the archetypes and not enough on actually clearly and concisely describing their attributes. Because of this, I feel that as an instructional book (as opposed to a general study of these archetypes) it falls short. There's also a bit too much page space taken up with extensive examples of characters of particular types, but without any justification for why those characters are supposedly examples of those archetypes because this information is presented solely in list form, barring a few specific examples.

What is well organized for an instructional book is the section containing outlines of the "feminine" and "masculine" journeys that I have already derided in this review. Now, despite the fact that I ardently disagree with genderization of these journeys, the way that the outlines are presented and then carefully explained, with notes about in which section of the story major changes should happen, is very useful and well done. As long as you put your character on whatever journey suits them, regardless of whether they have a Y chromosome.

The section on supporting characters, however, I only find useful as an example of How Not to Write a Story. This section leans entirely on deeply cliched conflicts and plotlines in its efforts to describe how to make supporting characters and will almost certainly result in the profoundly annoying kind of story wherein all verisimilitude is lost due the fact that every character but the protagonist clearly only exists in relation to the protagonist. Not to mention it includes some advice that is just baffling, like the assertion that the protagonist must never mistreat their love interest or risk losing the reader's sympathy, but it's perfectly fine for them to mistreat their friends.

Ultimately, I would highly recommend the book The Complete Writer's Guide to Heroes and Heroines over this one. Though it too has its moment of questionable gender politics and (largely unnecessarily, in my opinion) genderizes all of its archetypes, the information is presented in a much more concise, easily referenced, uniform, and useful manner. Most of the examples it uses are elucidated upon so that even if you are not familiar with the media from which the example came you can understand how it applies to the archetype. Prose-style description of the archetypes is at a minimum, just enough to give one a general overview of the character (call it flavor text if you will) before diving into the actual description and explanation of the character's attributes and how those might play out in a story. It also contains suggestions for how each archetype could have behaved at different life stages and markedly unique, sub-versions of each archetype (as opposed to the very shallow treatment of the "villian" version of the archetypes in 45 Master Characters). It also touches on the layering of archetypes to create even more complex and original characters. And, most usefully, it contains a large section wherein it explores how the archetypes interact with each other (as opposed to the paltry few sentences at the end of each archetype section in 45 Master Characters). Basically, The Complete Writer's Guide actually functions as a reference book containing archetypal bases or skeletons on which to build your characters. 45 Master Characters largely fails to do that and is much more prone to extensively describing a very fixed and stagnant character for each archetype, thus minimizing its usefulness unless you specifically want to make Victoria Lynn Schmidt's version of the Female Messiah or the Artist or what have you.

"One of the Best!"
I found this book more than helpful for writing characters. I have several books on this topic and this is one of the best that I have encountered. Each chapter is well organized and easy to understand. The author makes reference to characters in TV, film, novels, and history that most of us would recognize. Each chapter covers how the character should act, what his or her fears may be, how others perceive the character and gives ideas on how to develop a character arc. Each archetype is shown as a "hero" and as a "villain" with great detail given to each (and a summary at the end, in case you need to quickly reference). I found the information as a starting point to character creation. When discussing archetypes, I always see them as "shadows". What I mean is that they lack depth. However, you can take these and build to make original characters. To anyone who is interested in building more colorful characters and keeping them in character, I recommended this book.

"Sharpened my Characters Considerably"
Fiction is not reality. I had forgotten this when I was creating the characters in my current book. My characters were complex, but were not compelling. They were boring. They didn't interest me and would not interest a reader.

45 Master Characters fixed that problem for me.


For example, I had a character who is a woman trying to advance in a company. I had muddled ideas of whether she should be using sex to try to get ahead, how soft or tough she should be, and how she should think.

45 Master Characters helped me see that she fell into the category of the Father's Daughter. An archetype exemplified by Athena, Captain Janeway and Murphy Brown. Once I knew this I was able to see that she would not use sex to get ahead, that she would be fairly tough minded, and that she would be independent. I dropped a family from her backstory, removed any thoughts of her using sex to get ahead and generally tightened my picture of her. Ironically, my backstory included significant influence from her father, so I was already seeing glimmers of the "Father's Daughter" archetype before the book made it clear.

Schmidt gives us the positive and negative for each Archetype. For example the Father's Daughter has a negative side called The Backstabber (Katherine Parker "Sigorney Weaver" in Working Girl)

The book is an essential part of an author's reference library.

"Creating Characters with Greater Ease"
I've had trouble creating depth in my characters for ages. It leads to the phenomenon Schmidt describes in her introduction: "A flash of inspiration has drawn you to the blank page as you eagerly pour out what you feel in your heart is a great story. Then somewhere along the way you start questioning whether your story is a really good story after all. ... Soon, in the midst of outlines and character changes, you give up and move on to another idea, only to repeat the pattern." This book has helped me break that very pattern. You may work these archetypes in two ways, either from the very start and basing your characters entirely on your archetypes, or by working it into previously planned works and using the archetypes to flesh out stick figure characters.

I now plow forward into my current project revitalized and confident that I have created strong characters that can carry a full novel on their backs.