We'll send our best work every month.
Storytellers love character archetypes. They feel ancient and symbolic, and they’re just fun to play with. A while back, we mentioned archetypes we think stories are better without. To banish the rain on our archetype parade, here’s five we want to see more often. Read more »
We talk a lot about character competence, and one of our listeners had to remind us that we’d never really explained what that means. So this week, we explain ourselves. We talk about what competence means, why it’s important, and how competent various characters should … read more »
While incompetence is the villain’s bugbear, boredom is the death knell of a protagonist. A protagonist must carry the audience through the story. If the main character is boring, it can damage the story beyond repair. Read more »
What’s this? We’ve fallen through a portal into some kind of strange podcast universe. Oh well, might as well talk about stories where a character is transported from the real world into a fantasy setting. This podcast is Wes’ first time as an official co-host, … read more »
Your protagonist should be the most important character in your story. They have the emotional question to resolve, or they’re the key to solving a major crisis. But without meaning to, authors can overshadow their own protagonists with other characters. Naming all the ways this … read more »
Bad characters abound in our media, threatening to overwhelm our bastions of good storytelling. Or at least that’s how it can seem when you turn on the TV or flip through a random book. Many of these characters come from flawed archetypes that writers use … read more »
Archetypes tell us what role a character plays in a story. Many of these roles are critical for storytelling, but some are just the opposite. Troublesome roles allow storytellers to cut corners, reducing the overall quality of the tale. Take these five archetypes: Read more »
Stephen King* has published over sixty books since 1974 and has at least five film adaptations in development purgatory at any given time. He has no shortage of opinions on his chosen field and the audience he sells it to, which he celebrated in his … read more »
In The Hero of a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell demonstrated that many of the most popular stories, even over thousands of years and across cultures, shared a specific formula. That formula is now commonly referred to as mythic structure, or the hero’s journey. Even if … read more »