Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34327
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34327
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Stories are inhabited by archetypes. That does not seem to be a choice. It seems to be what the human psyche craves.

One has to ask, after all, why we like stories at all. We can suggest some practical purposes that stories serve, but for the most part they are simply entertainments, and it is very clear that certain sorts of stories work consistently. People don't tire of the same story over and over again. So there is something in us that is quite specific which craves a very particular kind of narrative which we call a story. There is no scope for originality here. The architecture of story is written on the human heart.

When we seek to describe the architecture of story, the successful explanations all seem to come back to archetypes. So, a knight is not just a guy on a horse with a tin suit. A knight is an archetypal hero. The Lone Ranger is a knight. James Bond is a knight. If you write a quest story, your hero is a knight. He may start out a bank manager, but he will have to pretty quickly find his inner knight or the story is going nowhere.

So, the standard Tolkienesque cast of beasties are simply one way of embodying the archetypes. There seems to be an endless appetite for this embodiment of the archetypes, but if you are tired of writing it, then you can certainly embody them differently, but you still need the same archetypes, because stories are populated by archetypes.

There are, of course, different embodiments of the same archetypes in different genres. The cowboy is a knight. The hard boiled detective is a knight. The bold sea captain is a knight. Captain America and Iron Man are knights. If you can figure out a new way to embody the knight, and the wizard, and the maiden, and the crone, and the trickster, you could be onto something good.

But there is a problem with creating a different embodiment of the archetypes. People will not be able to instantly recognize the archetypes when they see them. This means you have to spend time demonstrating that they are the archetypes so that people will recognize them in your story. There is nothing wrong with this. Authors of mainstream fiction do this all the time. But there is a reason that genre fiction embodies their archetypes the same way each time. It is so that the reader can instantly recognize the archetypes the moment they show up, allowing you to get straight to the action. For the impatient reader of popcorn fiction, this is important.

If your attempt at originality takes you away from the archetypes altogether, you are going to lose most of your audience, if not all of it. If your attempt at originality takes the form of embodying the archetypes in a new way, you may lose some of your audience, and you might be appealing to an audience outside the traditional audience of the genre you are writing in. (Note that a lot of mainstream and literary fiction takes the form of mystery, sic fi, fantasy, romance, or even western, but is not shelved with them because it does not fit with the conventions of those genres.)

Does this leave room for originality? I believe it does, but it is originality in other parts of the craft. Originality in diction, or in characterization, or in pacing and form are all possible, though originality should not be understood as doing something just because no one else is doing it. True originality means coming up with something that actually works, and that is no mean feat.

In the end, originality is not a virtue in itself in a novelist. The core virtue of a novelist is the acuity of their vision and the vividness with which they transmit that vision. If they are original it is because they needed to find a new way to express what they have seen. Innovation in the arts is the daughter of vision. Focus on refining your vision and on capturing and transmitting your vision and if innovation is required to accomplish that, it will take care of itself.

Original score: 10