The Hero's Journey - Archetypes

Hello, and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we dive into the hero's journey. So there's all these different tools that we're applying to the first draft to get it ready for the second draft. We've gone through the spreadsheet in full scap, and I talk a little bit about that in this episode. And then this one, we dive into the different archetypes of the hero's journey. So I think this is one, you know, we've all heard of the Hero's Journey, and if you look it up online, there's lots of different takes on it. And so we're going through it step by step through the archetypes. And I learned a ton in this one, and I think you will too, as a way to take the hero's journey and look at your story and see if you're hitting the right marks. So let's jump in and get started. So, Sean, we're in the middle of this transition of I have a working first draft, and we're trying to do the work so that I can write a second draft, which, you know, just like every part of the last two years is way different than I assumed it would be. You know, the first thing I thought was I was like, okay, I gotta go in and fix, you know, the continuity problems. And so up till now, the first thing you had me do was go through each scene and fill out the first. I think it was like half dozen columns of the StoryGrid spreadsheet at the same time, generate a brainstorm to do list so problems that need fixing and ideas like bigger ideas of how to make the book better. So I did that for all the scenes, came up with about 160 to do items. And that was the micro view of looking at each individual scene. And then the next step was to zoom out to the full scap, which is where you put your whole book on one page. And, and I tell you, that was last week, was just really eye opening to see, to work through those value shifts. And I'm not even sure if I had to do it again. I still totally have my head wrapped around it. But it was neat to see so many of these ideas. In practice, in a way that you can read the book and you can look at the examples, but when you try to do it yourself, it's hard to. You can see the holes in your knowledge. So that was really cool. And so it sounded like last week we have, like, two or three more big steps, big, you know, story grid tools that we apply to kind of get our head around what needs to be fixed in the second draft. And the next one was looking at the hero's journey. Is that right?

Yeah. Yes, that's true. And just to recap, I think the big takeaway from last week on the Foolscap was to look at the values in your story from the author's point of view. So you want to look at the story, and I think where you got messed up was you were looking at the story from the point of view of your lead character. Instead of looking at it from. In terms of the steps and the obligatory scenes and the value shifts of your genre, you were looking at it in terms of, you know, what Jesse would think. So it's.

Yeah. And I've been trying to do that in the last week with, like, any, like, the book I'm reading. You know, I've watched a couple movies, and I'm trying to, like, catch those moments when. Because what I kept struggling with is when something was from the protagonist point of view was bad, but from the storyteller's point of view was good, was positive.

Yes.

And I was trying to catch those while, like, I was paying attention to that dynamic when looking at other stories, basically, since we did that episode.

Exactly, exactly. So those are important things to look at to make sure that your story is progressing along the genre's requirements. And, you know, the thriller genre usually ends externally, positively, meaning the hero beats the villain. And if you're. If your thriller doesn't end that way, something like Seven, the movie Seven, where the villain actually wins at the end of Seven, that is a very, very daring choice by the writer that could really not work in terms of commercial potential. So the movie Seven, I remember because at the time I was at St. Martin's Press, and I commissioned the novelization of Seven by a wonderful writer named Anthony Bruno. And, you know, he and I talked about this when he was banging out the novel based on the screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, I think wrote it anyway, that thriller ends very negatively externally and internally. It ends on serious negatives because it was so ingeniously put together. It still satisfied a very large commercial market. And also the acting was phenomenal in it and the direction. I think David Fincher directed it and it really worked. But that's an exception to the rule. Usually your thriller is going to end positively. And so your. Your thriller ends positively. Your hero wins. But she also unleashes an ironic ending at the end, too, which is perfectly reasonable and, you know, viable. In fact, you need that kind of ironic ending for a sequel. So, anyway, I'm talking, you know, big picture again. And this, this is this episode of editing. And this, this tool for editing is all about tracking the hero's journey in the story. So the reason why you want to track the hero's journey is to really check to see that your lead character has an arc. Now, you know, everybody knows this, and these are one of those comments editors give writers all the time that, you know, the writer doesn't know what to do with. And that is. I kind of liked your book, but the character didn't arc. And what they're meaning by that is that the character did not change. So, you know, you've built in an internal genre, which is the maturation plot for Jesse. And that's all well and good, but if you don't actually find follow the monomyth of the hero's journey also within the story, your reader could not pick up, potentially, they would not pick up the actual movement of, you know, change of your internal genre. So the thing that I always recommend as sort of the third checkpoint of your editing process in the first, you know, on your first draft is to check the stages of the hero's journey and find out if you have hit moments that are reflected in the hero's journey. And the hero's journey that I use is the one from Christopher Vogler's book, the Writer's Journey. And, you know, Joseph Campbell has, I think, 19 or 18 stages of the hero's journey. And there are other people who also have their own sort of structure of the hero's journey. But I like Vogler's because it's very practical. And I think there are 12 points that you want to check in your story. And also the other thing that he really brings to light here are the archetypes in the hero's journey that, you know, you should really consider, you know, your secondary characters. Do you have a threshold guardian, for example, that is sort of the person that holds the character from moving from the ordinary world to the extraordinary world. Is there a character that plays that role, that archetype in your story? Because the closer you can mesh with the monomyth of the hero's journey, the more familiar it's going to be to a reader. They are going to lock in and understand the trajectory of the story better if these sort of, you know, cast elements are within your story itself. So what I think we should do in this episode is what I'd like to first talk about are the archetypes of the characters that you and I will try to identify if they are actually in your story. So of course, the first one is the hero, and the hero is Jesse. And the hero is the character that has to change and she changes by coming to the understanding that, you know, it's. It's better to sacrifice oneself for the betterment of others than to selfishly hold on to your own, you know, former worldview. If Jesse doesn't mature in this story, a lot of people could get very hurt. So she is the hero of our story and she's a very good, strong hero. We've talked about hero, victim and villain ad nauseam over the last 18 months. So it's very clear that Jesse is the hero. So check. Let's check that one off. Now, the next archetype that you really need in a hero's journey is the mentor figure. Now, the mentor is the person like Obi Wan Kenobi in Star wars or a series of people who teach the hero a new trick or they give them information that they don't know. So let's think about your story. Do we have clearly delineated mentors in your story? And who are they?

Well, so the first one is 86, I think. I always forget. I don't know why I keep forgetting the number. So the woman in charge of the numbered. Because she shows her how to navigate the numbered world so there would be one. And then towards the end, she has her brother that plays the mentor role. Well, I guess that starts in the middle and then at the beginning of the middle build. Az is kind of a mentor for a couple scenes. See, I would call him a threshold.

Guardian more than a mentor. Okay.

Because when you said that, I don't even know what that means, but we'll get to that.

Okay.

And so, but there's no, like, character that I could look at and be like, that is Gandalf right? Or whatever. So is that a problem?

Well, what do you think I mean?

Well, I would say if I. If she needs a mentor through the book right to the end where the, you know, they have to go on without the mentor. And that's when the mentor usually dies. In a lot of stories, there is no Strong mentor in the middle build. No, Balaam kind of is for one scene, but there is no strong mentor in the middle build.

Who is the mentor in Silence of the Lambs?

Oh, the main guy, Lecter.

Yes, Hannibal Lecter is a mentor. There's another mentor, too. It's Jack Crawford. Right, the.

Yeah, the FBI guy.

Right, right. So isn't that interesting where you have two mentors in that story? One is good and one is bad. And by the end of the story, we discover that the bad guy was. Well, the bad guy was actually, in terms of universal values, turned out to be. He's the only one who doesn't lie, is Lecter. And Crawford turns out to be not as great as we think he is at the very beginning of the story. So one of the ways to sort of deal with mentors in thrillers, and the reason why I bring up Silence of the Lambs is because you're writing a thriller is to consider, you know, polar values of different characters. So I think it's 86 or 81 or 83. She, at the beginning of the story, takes on the role of the good mentor and the brother in the middle build sort of seems to be a good mentor, too. And both of them turn out to be bad. Now, Balaam is sort of a cipher at this point, meaning we kind of had to drop him in to fix some story problems in the middle build. And, you know, when we did do that, I said, let's, you know, not forget about this guy because he could prove to be very valuable later on. So in terms of mentors, I think you need to limit them. You have to really clearly define them. And you need to have a very clear good mentor and a very clear bad mentor. And it doesn't mean that they can't shape shift. Meaning, like Crawford, we think he's good. At the beginning of Silence of Lambs, he shifts into somebody that we're suspicious of because he. He doesn't deal with Starling when the investigation is going well. He only uses her when he needs to get to Lecter. But then at the very end, after the death of his wife, Crawford shifts back to a good guy because he's the one who encourages her to go to Ohio to, you know, find Buffalo Bill. And in fact, he gives her, you know, every last dollar in his pocket so that she can afford to go to Ohio. So that's an interesting, you know, trajectory for that mentor character, is that he's sort of like, you know, lying to Starling at the beginning, using her, and then he shifts after he has a very tragic loss to understand that he didn't really treat her very well and that he needs to actually be a good mentor at the end of the story, which he is. So if we think about 83 or 86 in that context, we could have her move from good mentor that we all sort of attached to at the beginning hook of this story transitioning into a negative force who actually is in cahoots with the ultimate villain of your story. And then perhaps at the very end of the story, she shifts back and she has a moment where she realizes that she's betrayed Jesse. And then she shifts into, you know, sacrificial, you know, character who does a solid favor for Jesse at the end and ends up suffering the consequences for that. So 83 is certainly a mentor figure. The brother in the middle build introduces himself as a good figure. He turns bad. He's going to survive. Balaam, I think, should be a force that is not fully known in this first novel, but he appears relatively like maybe three or four times so that he doesn't physically appear. He virtually appears so that you can use Balaam. You're basically setting up Balaam as a larger figure in book two or book three. So you're going to have. You're going to have two mentors in this one. The good force that turns dark and then turns good again, and the dark force that seems good who turns seriously dark. So you have your mentors in here. You just need to think very clearly about how they're progressing through the story and how you're ultimately going to use them.

Okay.

So after, you know, you should put these in your notes and your to do list, look at your mentors, make sure that they're very clear, and make sure that there's some dynamic relationships there that are going to, you know, make your story richer in value. Do you have any questions about mentors now?

No, I'm sure I will when I actually try to pull this off, but I think I understand what you're saying.

Okay, so the next one. And a lot of these. Now, these archetypes are often, you know, momentary transitions in your story. They don't necessarily have to be recurring characters that are constantly sort of in the Greek chorus of your cast. But we need to sort of feel these elements as we're reading. They're sort of almost subtext, but we need to recognize them. So the next one is the Threshold Guardian. And this isn't as complicated as it might seem in the wizard of Oz, the movie, and in the novel the Threshold Guardian is the green guy at the Emerald palace or the Emerald City. So when Dorothy, the scarecrow, the lion and the Tin man, you know, they get to the end of the Yellow Brick Road, there's the Emerald City, they knock on the door, right? There's some cranky guy who answers the door and he goes, no, you can't come in. That's literally the Threshold Guardian. And the Threshold Guardians is. His or her purpose is to really sort of put a pin in the moments when your character moves from the ordinary world to the extraordinary world. So Dorothy now, of course, at the very, very, very. The inciting incident of the wizard of Oz is her being, you know, thrown out of ordinary reality and stuck into the land of Oz. That's not the shift of ordinary to extraordinary. The shift from ordinary to extraordinary moves after she goes on the road trip and then hits the Emerald City. And then we see the. The Threshold Guardian. So when you were talking about as showing Jesse around, I see as playing the role the Threshold Guardian in that scene. So you have complied. You have abided the necessity of having a Threshold Guardian because as is there to show her what this world is all about. So he doesn't. The Guardian doesn't have to say, no, you can't come in. He or she just has to explain the transitional moment. Okay. You were on that train. Now you're here, and now, you know, now you're in this extraordinary world. So your Threshold Guardian is absolutely in your story. And I think you've already made notes about sort of making that scene even more extraordinary where Jesse. Yeah, yeah, it's. It's gonna be incredible. Like, she's worried.

It's more like. Yeah, it's more of making the world more extraordinary. So the shift is even more jarring than it currently is.

Right, exactly. So as will be your vehicle to get that done.

And so you've brought up a lot about the first episode of Mad Men where the guy is trying to sleep with the girl and he shows her around like he would be the Threshold Guardian of that one.

Exactly, Exactly.

Okay.

And the great thing about Mad Men, not to go too deep into it, is that Matt Weiner, our wiener, you know, his lead character seems to be Don Draper. Right. But Don Draper does not change in the entire trajectory of Mad Men. We keep hoping he'll change, but he never really does. The person who does change is Peggy Olson. And so she's the one who gets the Threshold Guardian tour because she's the actual character in that story who, you know, she goes on a maturation plot and by the end of the, of the series, she's, you know, she's a hell of an advertising person. She, she's well, well, you know, she's very mature at that point. So. Yeah, that's a really great example of a Threshold Guardian too. The next one is the Herald. And the Herald role is really just about having moments in your story where somebody kind of sums things up pretty quickly, meaning.

They kind of hammer home what your hero is facing. They bring up the things that the reader needs to be reminded of. For example, it's not coming quickly to my mind, but when you have a character saying something like, well, what do you mean you have to do that? Aren't we, don't we have to do this? Because this, that and the other thing. Do you know what I'm kind of sort of saying? I'm trying to think of it. Yeah, they sort of sum up the crisis or, you know, the moment in time. Like the lion in the wizard of Oz, he'll like in moments when the things are getting really hairy, he'll go, what are you crazy? I'm not going into that castle. I might get hurt by those monkeys and Dorothy will get killed. Right. So you kind of have the Herald role. You know, it moves around depending upon, you know, the moments. So you could have secondary characters.

Would this be like, like movies that have like a narrator and voiceover that come in at different points? Like, would that be the Herald in certain. Some movies, yeah.

That's a way of cheating in a lot of ways.

But it's anything that comes along and like gives you information that you need to know for the story.

Yes, but they have to do it dramatically. So ideally, the problem with voiceover is that it's so. It's so sort of.

Okay, I think I got heavy handed. So in the first Star Wars. Well, Episode four, when they're all in the room and they pull up the plans to the Death Star and somebody explains what they're gonna have to do to destroy the Death Star.

Exactly.

It's giving that information.

Okay, Exactly.

So that means they could be different people at different points in the story that are just exactly giving. Yeah.

Okay, so for example, like in your novel, you know, Ernst or Alex absolutely played the Herald role when they say things like, well, Jesse, if you lose this Severin, you know what's gonna happen. Right. You know what happened?

Yeah, that's when they take her and she sees Randy or. Yes, not Randy, that got the other guy in the hospital. Now I understand, like, I'm only like a couple months out from writing this book and I don't remember it. And like when authors talk about having no memory of these books they've written. Yeah, I understand that a little more. So, yeah, so there's that. There's also the sergeant when he pulls everybody together and he tells them like, you know, the next, the next severing is coming and here's what it's going to be. And it gives them that information.

Yeah, okay. So it's perfectly reasonable. In fact, you need to have moments in your story that, you know, remind the reader about the consequences and the stakes that are, you know, at hand. So the Herald is a technique and an archetype to have somebody in your story relate that to the audience again. Okay, so that one's pretty clear. And you want to pick out moments usually right before the big moments. So one of the great, great big moments of your story is when Jesse, during the second severing, basically flips out and becomes impotent. She's incapable of doing anything because she's overwhelmed. So in order to set that, you know, that reaction up, you might have an argument right before she goes in between Ernst and Alex and the two of them are at each other. Well, she does this, that's going to happen. If she does that, that's going to happen. But what about this? And so they basically are this. The thinking of the reader explaining how big these stakes are, you know, in an argument right before the big moment. So the time to do Herald moments is usually just prior to a major turning point in your story. So keep that in mind. You don't want to just drop them in willy nilly, reminding readers of stakes that really don't matter all that much. You want to reserve the Herald moments for times that are very, very, you know, intense. Okay, let's move to the next one. The next archetype in the hero's journey that's always in there is the shapeshifter. And the shapeshifter is pretty easy to think about when you think about it in these terms. It's sort of they are people who act one way and turn out to be another. So a character like 83 or 86 or whatever her name is, she is a shape shifter, right? Because she moves from good mentor to ally with the dark mentor. So she's changed her sensibility to the reader. She's shifted. She's like the two faced person. There's an entire genre of crime called, oh my gosh, noir, where you have the femme fatale. And in noir crime, the femme fatale is usually, you know, the woman who comes to the private investigator's office. She says, I really need your help. Please, desperately, I need your help. And she seems like a victim at the start of the story. And by the end of the story, she's gotten the hero, the investigator, in such deep trouble that he ends up being, you know, thrown in prison or killed. That's a noir story. And that the femme fatale is a classic shapeshifter. She pretends to be one thing and is really another. So you need to have shape shifting in your story, or it reads like this doesn't seem quite right. I know plenty of people in the world who say one thing and do another. So you have to have shapeshifters in your story, as is a shapeshifter. Right. Because we think he's just this horrible, lousy person throughout the entire story until the climactic moment at the very end when he makes a sacrifice to save Jesse so that they can win the severing. Correct. Right. Right. So he plays the role of shapeshifter too. So you need to have shapeshifters in your story. Okay, let's move on to the next one. The next archetype is called the shadow. And the shadow, for lack of a better way of describing it, is essentially.

The opposite of your hero or your villain. I mean, it's sort of your villain. The Shadow character is the character that does all of the things that the hero won't do. The hero has a certain code, ethics, or morals that they won't cross over, but the shadow will. The shadow is the villain. So the shadow forms the conflict with your hero. And not to get too psychological here, but the villain in a thriller is always, you know, the darkest, deepest, you know, elements of your hero.

So is this like a ying and yang kind of thing? Or like, whatever the hero is, the villain should be the opposite?

Yes, like.

So I'm thinking, like, in the show 24, you know, Jack Bauer will do, you know, will do anything to save his country, and the villain will do anything to destroy the country.

Right. In the Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill actually have a lot in common. And the reason why it's so brilliantly created is that Buffalo Bill is a serial killer who believes that he's a woman. So he is murdering women and basically flaying them, cutting their skin off so that he can build his own and make his own woman suit so that he can Literally change himself from a man into a woman. Now, you might say to yourself, how is that anyway related to Clarice Starling? What Clarice Starling is doing in the story is she is trying to move away from her white trash West Virginia background into a new skin. She wants to be a very well respected, erudite FBI agent like Jack Crawford. So the two of them want to shift their, you know, their reality from one status point to another. Now, Buffalo Bill will literally cut people's skin off to do what is necessary to get what he wants. Starling would never do that. So Starling is doing it, you know, internally. He's doing it externally. That's his shadow.

So this is kind of the whole cliche of like, we're not so different, you and I. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Okay?

And a lot of. Yeah, exactly. A lot of villain speeches are exactly that. Oh, come on. Now, you and I both know that people are stupid. I'm just trying to get some order in the universe. And you continue to defend the stupid. Right, so.

So do they often want the same thing, just they're going about it different ways?

Yes. What Randy wants and what Jesse wants are very similar. What Jesse wants is freedom, right? She wants to be free of, you know, the shackles put on her in that very strange society that she lives in. She wants to be free to live within her family. She wants to go back in time to when things were good.

And that's what she's doing. Because when she gets caught stealing, that's her doing those things.

Right? And Randy, he wants freedom, too. Randy wants to get out of the prison that he's in so that he can, you know, rule the world, rule the faction. So what he wants is freedom in the future. What Jesse wants is freedom from the past. Randy doesn't want to go back in time. Jesse wants to go back in time. Randy wants to go in the future. These are good shadow elements that, you know, we've constructed over the past 18 months that we didn't sit down and go, huh, let me think. If she wants to be that way, he has to be that way. And these are the good organic things that come from knowing structure, knowing craft. And, you know, I remember telling you numbers of times that you were creating and abiding certain things without even knowing it. So this idea of the shadow, I think, is strongly inside your story. The note to make to yourself is, are there opportunities in my story where I can even highlight the shadowiness? You know, like when you said, you're not so different you and I, that's an effort to highlight the shadow element. Okay.

So the process, then, from the beginning, is to write the story, then look for things that are in there that we need that is like, oh, okay, so I kind of subconsciously did this, but now with the second draft, I can consciously go back and turn. Turn that five into an eight and that seven into a ten.

Exactly. So you want to magnify the things that are already in there. And the way you do that is to identify the things that are in there based upon the hero's journey elements and based upon micro and macro structural ideas. Okay, so we've got shadow. The next archetype that you really want is. This is obvious. Are allies. You know, you need to have allies in your story. Now, obviously, Ernst and Alex are Jesse's allies. Robin is Batman's ally. And there's a reason why superheroes end up in leagues of justice. And, you know, all things like that. Because you want people to have. You want your characters to have allies in the story so that community forms on the side of good. And then they. If there's more than one person on the side of good, the chances of them triumphing at the end are stronger than if it's just Lone Wolf McQuaid, you know, doing everything he can to outsmart the evil. So even in those old Western movies with Clint Eastwood, you know, the. The man with no name who rides into town, he ends up getting some allies. So if your story also creates.

It also then creates. Aren't they often. And they do, in my story, used to create tension for the protagonist because now they have somebody they care about.

Yes. And also you can.

Right.

You can also use the Judas element of an ally later on. You know, the betrayal of. Like in the Matrix.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, the guy, you know, that great actor. I forget his name. Yeah. He plays Ally and then betrays everybody. Joey Pantolini. Pantaleone. Yeah, Joey Pants. I remember he did a book at a friend of mine, I think, edited his book. And he used to come into the office all the time. People go, hello, Mr. Mr. Pantaleone. And he'd go, no, just call me Joey Pants.

So anyway, there. There's a little anecdote for you. All right? So the last sort of archetype in the hero's journey is the trickster. And the trickster is sort of the. The clown. And, you know, it doesn't have to be, you know, a single cast moment, but often it is like you would usually have, you know, there was a whole Series of movies where you would have the trickster played by, you know, I can't even think of it like Tom, you know, the guy who's married Tom Arnold. Like Tom Arnold used to play like the trickster in movies like True Lies, you know, the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. He's the guy who's like, oh my God, what do we do? You know, he's sort of the comic relief of the story. The one who screws something up and it ends up ending up, you know, for the better. The trickster is the one that sort of brings down the, the drama in moments by messing something up or pointing out.

So like in Lord of the Ring.

Go ahead.

Lord of the Rings, it's the Marion Pippin.

Right, right. Okay.

And then now are they so. But I would also classify them as allies in that too. And that's, that's. I would think that's normal in what you just described. They're like the, the sidekick kind of fuck up.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Okay, is there another. Because that. Now that's like the only version I can see in my head. Are there other. Like is there tricks? Because to me a trickster sounds bad. So like, are there versions of a trickster where like they're actually have evil intent?

Yes.

Or is it usually. Okay, is there an example that that comes to mind?

The famous trickster is from, is Loki in the, you know, the, the Norse myths and Loki is the one who betrays, you know, he gets the hammer from Thor or something. My Norse myths aren't what they once were, but so Loki. Yes, you can have a trickster who's sort of funny and people laugh about Rasputin. That's a trickster. That's a trickster from history. Rasputin during the tsar reign in Russia. You know, he got some people would say Cromwell, as I'm talking about real life tricksters now these are people who, you know, use their popularity to gain sort of an alliance with a powerful figure and they have, you know, plans of their own later on to, to take advantage of it. So yeah, tricksters can either be just sort of dim witted and funny and make mistakes or they could be, you know, often people use tricksters, they drop them in the story and then the big turning point in the story is the trickster turns out to be the really evil one. Like in, you know, that, that Pixar movie, the Incredibles. The trickster in that movie is the man who's the, you know, the biggest fan of the heroes and he turns out to be the evil one. So tricksters can be converted into the villains too. So all of these archetypes, you want to go ahead, who's the trickster in.

Silence of the Lambs? Hannibal.

Yeah, it's Lecter. Because Lecter, okay, takes great satisfaction and enjoyment watching these little idiots run around at the very start of the novel. We know that Lecter knows exactly where Buffalo Bill is. He's in Belvedere, Ohio.

So it's not always a comic relief.

Well, it's. Right, right. It's not always comic relief. It's manipulative, Machiavellian.

Okay?

Tricksters and Native American myths are, you know, they do that sort of thing too. They also, they're not necessarily evil, but they enjoy watching the stupidity of humanity on full display. And Loki is like that too, in the Norse myths. So you know how we're talking about myth now. It's because Joseph Campbell, you know, he looked at Native American myths, he looked at Norse myths, he looked at Asian myths and Indian myths and all sorts of things. And he found these elements in all of these stories. So these archetypes are universal. These are universal human archetypes. This isn't just, you know, somebody who watched a bunch of movies, came up with these ideas. These are from all of, you know, all of time. So if you have. If you don't have these players in your story, then the universality is reduced. You know, some of the great writers, their novels are translated all over the world and they're bestsellers all over the world. And it's because they have these sorts of characters and archetypes in their stories. So somebody in Istanbul can enjoy Dan Brown as much as somebody in Illinois.

So in my book, I don't think I have a trickster unless it's Randy. But otherwise I don't. There's nobody that's like offering comic relief. There's nobody that's like playing everybody, you know, as a fool. I mean, would you agree with that?

I would agree with that. And I think, I think you should consider either converting one of the secondary characters into a trickster sort of character or to add one possibilities would be to make Ernst or Alex a trickster. Alex. For some reason the distinction between Ernst and Alex to me is that Alex is powerful and strong. Ernst is intellectual and weak physical. Right. So that's a little bit, you know, it's fine, but, you know, would it be more interesting to make one of the characters more trickster? Like, you know, kind of like the absent minded professor kind of sensibility. Like, think, let's think about Harry Potter for a second. Who provides the majority of comic relief in Harry Potter? Is it like Ron Weasley?

Yeah, he's part of it. I would say. The other one would be Neville.

Right.

Neville Longbottom. Ron is screwing up. Like there's the one book where like his wands broken the whole time. So he's always like messing up his spells.

Yes.

But I would say over the series of seven books, Neville would be the Trickster because he's the one that never can get it together. And he's ends up as a hero at the end.

Right. So. And also the. I forgot the girl woman. And what's her name again? Hermione. Hermione. She's very. She's the intellectual of the group. She's a very, you know, strong, smart presence. And Ron sort of plays the, you know, the screw up sometimes. So instead of it just being Alex strong, Ernst weak, it might be interesting where you could kind of. Ernst could be the pragmatic, intelligent one who's not all that physically strong. And Alice could play more of like the bumbling, esque, comic reliefy trickster kind of element. You know, sort of like the character in Guardians of the Galaxy. You know, the, the one who's the tree. What's his name? Root or wolf or group. Right. Like, Groot is sort of, you know, he's. Yeah, he kind of. He can't say anything but Groot, I'm Groot. And he kind of has a detachment from the other ones. He's more powerful than them all. He ends up saving them in the first one. So he, the trickster turns into, you know, the. Or the other trickster is the, is the, the what is he a fox or a rabbit or what?

The raccoon.

You see what I mean?

Like, he's a raccoon.

It doesn't have to be one character. It's the spirit of the trickster.

And you would say, tell me again what the spirit of the Trickster is. Because you're describing both the bumbling sidekick and Hannibal Lecter as a trickster. That's what, what makes them similar. Like what? Like give me a definition that encapsulates both of them.

Well, okay. The Trickster is sort of like they're mischiefy. They enjoy, you know, doing things that get other people in trouble. And you're right, the, the sidekick who is always screwing up is not exactly the element of the trickster. The trickster enjoys mischief in order to change people's worldviews in a way. So Lecter is a trickster because he's. He's enjoying the mischief of putting Clarice Starling in such deep, you know, jeopardy. He kind of enjoys.

So another.

Go ahead.

Because I was thinking maybe it could be like, the sergeant who loves to, like, sadistically do things to get. Keep all the recruits kind of upended. But it seems like the trickster never has, like, real power. He uses his trickster ness to control people, but he never, like, has the power in the story because, like, Lecter's locked up the whole time.

Yeah, but he's very powerful and he's. He manipulates everybody to get his ultimate release.

Yeah, but he doesn't have. I guess I'm saying, like, he can't, like, make decisions in the story. Most. What we're. Every trickster we've talked about is not physically in charge of anything. I mean, the other. Another trickster that comes to mind would be in Hogan's Heroes. Remember that show?

Yes.

Did you ever watch it?

Yeah.

You know the. When they're so these. It's a comedy base where these guys are in the concentration camp, which does not sound like a comedy when you say it like that. And there was that sergeant who was always like, I see nothing. Yeah, yeah, I know nothing.

Yeah, Sergeant Schultz. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, like, he would be.

You know, it's the spirit of mischief. You know, it's sort of like your friend when, you know, it's really hot in the summer and you're 12 years old and they go, let's go pool hopping. And you run around the neighborhood to find people who are away, and you go swim in their pool, knowing that you can get in deep trouble for that. They want to create mischief to, you know, get things going.

And so their role in this story is to keep things off balance.

Exactly. And they. They make mistakes that end up like the raccoon is a trickster. In Guardians of the Galaxy, Groot is kind of. Yeah, Groot is probably not as much of a trickster, but the lead character, the guy. What is his name? Peter or something, He's a trickster. Right. He's always dancing and goofing around and trying to, you know, goof around with people. The Guardians of the Galaxy is one of those, you know, tongue in cheek superhero movies where there's a lot. The spirit of the trickster is what drives the story. The other one, Deadpool. Deadpool is definitely a trickster. Okay.

Yeah, I think I'm getting it because I'm thinking. So another one I like is in the last Mission Impossible movie, there's, like, one of the guys, he's constantly screwing up and getting Tom Cruise into, like, a worse situation that he's now got to dig them both out of.

Right, right.

Then that, to me, that's the crossover. Right. So the bumbling guy and Hannibal Lecter are just constantly knocking things off kilter.

Yes.

Okay. So it's not like it doesn't have to have an, like a. Like a negative or a positive motive. It's the role of knocking things off kilter.

Yes. They want change. They want mischief. They want to knock people out of. They're inciting, you know, characters. They incite a lot of things. Things. They're causal inciting things.

Okay, all right, so I'll have to think about how to add that element in. All right, so we went through the hero, the mentor, the Threshold Guardian, Heralds, Shapeshifter, Shadow Allies, and Trickster.

Yes.

So those are the eight archetypes. So next week will be part two of the hero's journey, and we'll actually go through the moments in the story of the, like, ordinary world crossing the threshold, you know, the road back, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, sounds good. Okay, thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. For everything StoryGrid related, check out storygrid.com make sure you pick up a copy of the book and sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss anything happening in the Story Grid universe. If you'd like to check out the show notes for this episode or any past episodes, all of that can be found@storygrid.com podcast. If you would like to reach out to us, you can find us on Twitter StoryGrid. Lastly, if you would like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on itunes and leaving a rating and review. Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at StoryGrid. We will see you next week.