This is the third of Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s writerly ‘how to’ books that I’ve read, and the things I found useful about it are very similar to the previous two books. I doubt that it’s breaking deep new ground with its approach, but it’s useful for me, and will be one I’ll refer back to a lot over the next year.
A Writer’s Guide to Characterisation builds on the archetypes Schmidt gave in her previous 45 Master Characters. These archetypes are designed as bases for characters who will click with an audience, and the first half of the book looks at how the archetypes interact with each other. Schmidt discusses how these archetypes are likely to see each other, how they will cooperate and how they’ll clash. I took some issue with the division into male interactions, female interactions and romantic interactions – as if only male-female relationships can be romantic, and they can’t be any other way – but I understand that Schmidt’s providing shortcuts in a limited page count, so I’ll cut her some slack. The romance could be added or removed from these relationships while still making use of Schmidt’s guidance. If you’ve read 45 Master Characters, then it’s a useful appendix to that.
The second half of the book gives a new set of archetypes, based around animals and loosely grounded in Jungian psychology. These aren’t substitutes for the previous archetypes, but something that could be used just as readily with them as instead of them. Rather than focusing on classic fictional personality types, these focus on the character’s theme, purpose and arc. While this isn’t totally detached from the character’s personality, it did remind me that the two aren’t the same. You could write three similar protector characters but give each a very different story by making one learn about trust, one about freedom, and one about patriotism. I don’t think I’ll be looking at these as often as the previous 45 models, which I use for most of my characters, but I will use them.
I ended up with two main lessons from this book. One’s familiar – frameworks and archetypes can be useful. If you treat them as a support rather than a restriction, then they can provide shortcuts on some aspects of a character, freeing you up to think about the other details. If you know where you’re starting from, they can also raise the right questions to give your character depth.
The other lesson was that a character’s personality and motivation aren’t the same as the arc, the changes they’ll go through and lessons they’ll learn from the story. Having options in a book will help me not to use the most obvious arc for each character, and that’s got to be a good thing.
Now excuse me, I have a chapter to go write. But before I do, I should consider whether my heroine’s character arc fits the archetypes of a horse or a whale.
