Throwback Thursday: Archetypes and the Villain: Towards more complex characterization

Crossposted on Blogetary.

This article was originally published in the July 2008 issue of Illuminata, a newsletter of Tyrannosaurus Press. It has been slightly edited and updated.

Archetypes and the Villain: Towards more complex characterization

by

Rachel V. Olivier

A few weeks ago I took a writing workshop on archetypes and mythology at the Craft and Folk Art Museum here in Los Angeles. It was more of a private writing type of workshop – looking at yourself and your family for personal archetypes, etc., but several of us were there to work on our fiction as well. According to the woman who led the workshop, most people have knee jerk reactions to at least one or more archetypes and this is probably where they need to focus their psychological and emotional healing. Fully integrated people (i.e. those rare and lucky people who have no psychological and emotional baggage) rarely have those same knee jerk reactions.

Now just to pause a moment – archetypes are not stereotypes, though they can lapse into stereotypes. Archetypes are basic personalities that are so ingrained in the collective psyche that they occur in most stories written or acted out. The Hero, The Villain, the Damsel in Distress are three very general archetypes that are familiar to everyone. The Father, the Mother, and the Child are three that exist in every single culture around the world.

The first thing that popped into my morbid brain during the workshop was the following thought: Serial Killers must really be fractured (not integrated) personalities because they actively seek out and hunt the archetypes they have knee jerk reactions to. Of course I didn’t bring this up in the workshop, but I wrote it in my journal and got to thinking about all the different ways Villains (seeing as most Serial Killers are Villains, unless of course your name is Dexter…) behave and why.  There are many books, films, RPGs, etc., where the Villain is simply the Villain. There is no explanation or analysis for why they are the way they are. They just are evil.  That is the part – the archetype – they play.  It works, but at best, it creates a two-dimensional character and at worst, it saps energy and tension from the story. If a writer is going to tell a tale with rich characterization the story will feel lopsided if they spend all their time showing why the Hero and his or her friends are the way they are and no time on why the Villain is the way s/he is.  The writer needs to find out which archetypes the Villain is reacting to in his or her life, and why, thus creating a more complete and engaging character.

According to Tami Cowden (www.tamicowden.com), the author of The Complete Guide to Heroes and Heroines, there are at least 16 separate villain archetypes: Tyrant, Bastard, Devil, Traitor, Outcast, Evil Genius, Sadist, Terrorist, Bitch, Black Widow, Backstabber, Lunatic, Parasite, Schemer, Fanatic, and Matriarch. There are probably lots of others and a host of variables, but her list seemed a good place to start when looking at and understanding the Villain.  Her descriptions are just 3-4 sentence explanations of what these Villains are and how they work.  The Tyrant, for example, is a bully, craves power and hoards it, and will crush anyone who gets in his way.  But why is he the way he is? Was he bullied? Was he powerless as a child, watching helplessly as his world was destroyed by the archetypes in his life (The Mother, the Father, the Bitch, the Traitor, etc)? This is an important part of not only making the story more rich and appealing, but also in showing how the Hero can overcome the Tyrant and in creating a more interesting plot. Typically, the seeds of the Villain’s downfall are found in how s/he became what they are.

A better example may be illustrated by Lex Luthor, Superman’s Nemesis.  It may not be so obvious in the older Lex Luthor, but the younger one, as played by Michael Rosenbaum in the CW television show Smallville, paints a very complex character. This Lex is a Villain, no doubt about it. He’s a Devil: charming, charismatic, able to exploit the weaknesses he sees in others for his own ends. He not only is able to rationalize other people into compromising their views and seeing his side, but he’s also able to rationalize to himself why he does some of the things he does.  He is also easily one of the more likable characters on the show. He is so good at justifying himself that it is easy find yourself conflicted when rooting for the “Hero” – Clark Kent – to win the day, because you almost, almost, want Lex Luthor to win the day.  He just sounds so reasonable, which is a characteristic of the Devil Villain archetype.

Lex Luthor is a strong example of showing what can happen when writers choose to show what the Villain reacts to, why the Villain is the way s/he is.  The writers have actively demonstrated the ambivalent relationship that Lex has with his father, both seeking his approval and competing against him.  In fact, in every relationship Lex Luthor has had that a normal child would learn love and trust from, he has been betrayed in. Being the “good” son that he is, he has done his best to not only survive, but thrive, in the competitive environment his father keeps him in.  Thus, the engaging Devil character who is able to charm and manipulate allies and foes alike becomes the engaging Villain that the audience now has sympathy for. The emotional conflict hooks the audience, pulling them through the story to the final outcome.

Some writers turn this idea on its head by creating an Anti-hero – the Villain as Hero, in effect.  Some examples are the protagonists of Dexter, House, or the short-lived series Profit. Stephen Donaldson did it with his protagonist in the Thomas Covenant Chronicles. George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series has many characters that walk the line between Anti-hero and Villain. These people are not nice people. They are NOT “Hero” material.  In fact, they are distinctively, disturbingly, unlikable people. The trick is, again, to explain why they are the way they are so that the audience has some sympathy for them.  They are no better than the Villain, but having been put in the role of protagonist the audience wants some reason to think they might be redeemable.  So, what archetypes were in the lives of such Anti-heroes? What archetypes from their past are they reacting to in such a way that they have become the inimical characters they are now? As the writer explores the whys and wherefores behind these questions, they are better able to plot a story that is engaging, strong, and very readable. One that will grab the reader by the throat and pull them through to the end.

Five tips on proofreading your own work

I and others have addressed this before, but I thought I would address it again as spring is coming, students are writing papers or theses or dissertations and writers are trying once again to pull out their manuscripts and do some writing whilst sitting incognito at the park or at least outside at their favorite cafe. So, below are five tips on how to proofread your own work.

1) Find someone else to read your work. I know, I said proofreading your own work, but having a fresh set of eyes to look over your work is truly the best thing you can do. It doesn't have to be a paid proofreader. It can be a fellow writer or classmate. Trade papers or manuscripts with them. Determine what you want them to look for (just typos? awkward sentences? Inconsistencies?) and what you will be looking for in their writing. Stick to those objectives. It's much easier to see something in someone else's work than to see it in your own. Once you get your work back from your friend or classmate, thank them and go to your safe place and be prepared to see what you missed. (If your friend wandered off the instructions and wrote in editorial remarks then feel free to ignore those, or take them into consideration. This exercise is all about the proofreading.)

2) Put your work away for an extended period of time. This is called letting your manuscript "bake". Students don't always have this option as they have due dates and times - unless of course they've actually written their paper in a timely enough manner that this is possible. If you don't have a due date, let the manuscript "bake" for a good month or so. If you are a student and the paper is due soon, then put the paper away and don't look at it until after you've had a good night's sleep, a good meal and have had time for your brain to hit "reset" - a good solid 12 hours if possible. Your brain is a very efficient machine and fills in where things may be missing or wrong in your copy. What you're trying to do is give your brain a chance to "forget" the copy you've been working on and see it fresh. This way you have a better possibility of seeing clearly missed or misspelled words or rewritten sentences that haven't quite been cleaned up, yet.

3) Go Old School and proofread the hard copy. Yes, you love your laptop. You curl up with it at night to watch movies and use it during the day to do homework or write your Greatest American Novel in between side trips to Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. And yes, you'd rather save money and the environment by not using paper and ink on printing out what will be just another marked up copy. But your eyes see a computer screen differently than they do an actual piece of paper. The type on your computer screen is constantly moving, where the type on a piece of paper is still on the page. You may actually catch more mistakes on the hard copy because of this. So, print out your work, grab a favorite pencil or red pen (whatever you like working with best that you will see clearly), curl up in your safe place and read your piece, line by line.

4) Read it out of order. There's an old adage that proofreaders read copy backwards to catch all the mistakes. That is only true some of the time, but it does help if you're reading lists, figures or haven't been able to get enough distance between you and your manuscript or paper. Grab a ruler, that usually helps. What you're going to try to do is look at the copy as you would a math problem. You aren't "reading" the copy - you are just looking at the copy as discrete symbols strung together in coherent single words and then sentences. This is a trick that's only good for catching typos, though you might find the occasional awkward sentence (especially if your brain still remembers diagramming sentences from junior high).

5) Read it through one more time. You will never get all the mistakes. I work for a newspaper where writers, three editors, a proofreader and graphic designer all read through most of the monthly paper before it goes out, and we don't always catch all the mistakes. But read it through one last time before hitting send. If there are important names or terms that you are using in your paper or manuscript, then make sure you have a list of them next to you and make sure all those are spelled correctly, if nothing else. Spot check for periods, especially at the end of paragraphs. If there are mistakes you make all the time (then vs. than vs. that, your vs. you're, its vs. it's, their, they're and there, etc.) then use the Control F (Find) function to go through and look for those places where you may have used one or the other.

In the end, you may just end up finding that one glaring mistake AFTER you hit send, but at least you know went through and found all the others. Or, at least MOST of all the others. Well, at least you gave it the old college try. But hopefully these tips will help you produce a cleaner and more professional document than you would have otherwise produced on your own.

But if you'd like help proofreading and copyediting your dissertation, thesis, paper or book, please make sure to keep Putt Putt Productions in mind.

I'm Baaack! And other bits of news.

Well, I got discouraged over the none response to blogs and then tried to blog again at Christmas, but my Blogetary at on the Wordpress blog had crashed and I didn't know how to fix it so I gave up. I guess I could have blogged here, but I gave up. And I was busy. So last night, I finally got back on the bandwagon because my blog got fixed. So now I can repost here what I blogged there. Hopefully you'll enjoy it. Or not. I do meander.

Rachel Olivier at Mountain View Cemetery, January 2014

See there? That's me at Mountain View Cemetery last month when Mom and I went out there to track down a relative's grave. It was a good trip. Took three hours to get out there by bus, but it was a good full day. And it was a good visit with my mom. So,where have I been? Well, somehow, back in December, when I was writing a blog, something got messed up in the innards, the code, of the thing. I don't know code. I didn't know how to fix it. I didn't have time between making Christmas presents and trying to get back to work on my novel to track down an answer. Then Mom came to visit. It's taken this long for me to have a good solid hour and a half to spend on the phone on hold so I could find someone to help me out. *sigh* But it's done now, and here I am!

The game plan, back last fall and winter, was to finish my novel and be able to email/mail it to people who had volunteered to read it by Christmas or New Years. But, with the crafting and the Christmas and the cleaning and the visit, and then there was a complete restructuring of the first part of the book, all creative work on it came to a halt. Now I'm trying to get that momentum going again while my friends still have a sleepy winter to read through. I don't think that's going to happen. Chances are I'll send out the book to them right when they're all going on vacation or really busy at work. There's still so much I need to catch up on. Last fall I was staying up until 2 or 3 a.m., sleeping until 8 a.m., going to work, coming back, taking a nap, and then ignoring everything but the novel, assuming I could then finish by Christmas and then move on with everything I was putting off. But instead, the novel isn't finished and neither are all things like bookkeeping that I put on hold for so many months. And I'm trying to go to bed early and get up early.
I think I might need to go back to the stay up until 2 a.m. and get up at 8 a.m. schedule. I got stuff done then. Trying to be in bed by 10 or 11 p.m., I end up awake at 1 a.m., and have a tough time getting back to sleep and I still sleep until 8 a.m. So, I'm still tired and nothing gets done. I hate afternoons. I never get anything constructive done in the afternoon. It needs to be at night. That's when my brain relaxes and opens up and work gets done. I used to always say I needed to live someplace where I'd sleep in the afternoons, so I think I'm going to go back to that. See if that won't kick my brain back into gear so I can finally finish this huge multi-character fantasy novel book thing that's been sitting in my brain for the past 30 years.
In the meantime, though, I still need to do those other things - the bookkeeping, taxes, housework, seeing to family issues - things that I put off for so long. And I still need to get to work, pay bills, and somehow find more work so I can make the rent that was raised this month.
We'll see how this goes. I was so ready to have this book done by the end of December, and now I feel like that song, Brother Can You Spare a Dime. I grew up hearing Judy Collins singing it, and whenever I felt depressed or like things weren't going anywhere, that was what it felt like to me, even back in high school. And then I start asking myself why I can't just be normal and want a regular job and regular life like everyone else. But then Utah Phillips - or more correctly Dorothea Brownell - said it best when she said to Utah's daughter Morrigan when she was complaining of the same thing about her dad. (I recommend listening to the entire 6:45 minutes, but the bit below shows up at around 4:50) Imagine the desire of young tween girl to fit in and not be embarrassed by her dad.
Morrigan Bell: "Why aren't you normal?!"
Dorothea Brownell gives Morrigan's shin a kick. "He is normal! What you meant to say is average!"
I try to remember that, but it takes work.
That's a bit of what's been going on here. Hope to get back to blogging regularly and more coherently and focused. Please remember me for any of your proofreading or copyediting needs. Or if you need an article written or a resume revised. Or check out my fiction and poetry at rachelvolivier.com.

The last of the late, great blog contests, blogs, other things.

Crossposted from blogetary:

Well, last month's blog contest went over like a lead balloon. But that kind of implies at least a modicum of flight. It's better to say it sank like concrete shoes into the deepest, darkest part of the ocean. No one entered. So, I will not be trying that again.

I have a friend who taught me this saying, "You get up. You put your boots on." Some days that's all you can do. Nothing else but to look before you and try to put one foot in front of the other.

Otherwise, what's the alternative? I try to remember that, because each day brings new possibilities, but the truth is that sometimes the only reality is doing what's before you and realizing it just may not ever get any better.

This should be a post either espousing some great literary, writerly thing, or hawking my wares as an author, or putting my proofreading business out there. Or even trying to sell ad space in the classified section at the Larchmont Chronicle. That's what I should be doing. But, I've kind of run out of steam, you see.

1) I sold a book at a bookstore, but the bookstore, having held onto my books (2 of each) for a year, bless their hearts, sent back the other 7 books.

2) My books on Amazon haven't sold in a year and a half.

3) Haven't sold a book on Lulu for about a year.

4) Haven't sold many books on Alban/Sam's Dot Publishing, either.

5) Classified ads are struggling along, but they are barely paying for themselves. I don't know what I was thinking even taking those on. I'm not a salesperson.

6) Over the last few months, I've averaged about $150/month in proofreading business (gross).

7) The proofreading gig that I had oh-so-briefly and hoped was going to be regular monthly additional income, albeit small (they were getting it for $15/hour instead of the regular $25/hour), and that I hoped would lead me to other proofreading jobs, has gone away. I think I made it worse by begging to get it back.

I've applied to Pavilions/Safeway. That's within walking distance so I know I won't have to worry about being late on the bus. I've sent in applications to temp agencies, but the stuff they have is usually a 2 hour bus ride away and I can't guarantee I'd ever get to work on time. I'm looking for gigs on Guru.com and Monster.com. Media Bistro stuff is all in New York, but I try there, too sometimes.

I can only do what I can do. I am college educated with a degree in English Literature from a good liberal arts college. I have more than 13 years of experience proofreading and copyediting, as well as editing journal articles and undergraduate academic papers and sprucing up resumes, cover letters and bios. I do a good job.

I am not a book editor. That takes training and an apprenticeship that I have not had. And I'm not a replacement for a writers group where someone can hammer out the good and bad of their work in progress. I am too casual and cavalier in who I am for the corporate business world. No one but my friends and family seem to be crazy about my stories. But I am a darn good proofreader and copyeditor.

I could try to be a barista at a coffeeshop again, but the machines have changed so much since 1996, I'm not sure I'd adapt well unless it were an old school Italian coffeeshop that had a machine with a good pull on it.

I don't know what else to do. I guess we'll see what the future holds.

You get up. You put your boots on.

Well, Hello August

Cross posted from Blogetary:

Realized yesterday that July was over (duh) and I had completely forgotten at least three birthdays during July, if not more. That's July for me.

For me, the month of July is like the hours between 3 and 5 p.m. on any given day. I know they're there. I see them coming. I know that unless I fight it with all my might, my body will become a sluggish bunch of goo at that time. Anything you tell me, I will forget. My brain will slow down and go into sleep mode. And if I do happen to sleep, when I wake up I'll look around and wonder where the two hours went and what a waste of time and I could have been getting so much done....

That's what July is like for me. I saw it coming. I knew I'd probably have little or no paying work coming in. I knew I'd forget everyone's birthday unless it was posted on Facebook. I knew I'd feel like I'd slept through the entire month once I hit August. I tried to prepare for it,  yet here I am, realizing once again that I forgot Pye's birthday, my cousin's birthday and a friend's birthday. *sigh*
In a perfect world, I'd be able to save up enough money throughout the rest of the year to take July off completely. Maybe grab the cat and go rent a cabin or something someplace. Oh well.

So, hello August! Good to see you! Let's see about getting some things done.

On that note, a year ago in August 2012 my novella, Needs Must When the Devil Drives came out through Sam's Dot Publishing. And I still have some copies here. So I thought I might see what I could do to find a home for one or two of them.

A year before that, in June of 2011, my novella The G.O.D. Factor came out through Sam's Dot Publishing. Still have some copies of those. Also could find a home for a couple.

A lot of changes have happened over at Sam's Dot Publishing since these books were published, and where exactly to get these was a musical chair shuffle for a little while. White Cat Publications, Alban Lake Publishing and Sam's Dot Publishing all seem to have listings for Needs Must When the Devil Drives, while The G.O.D. Factor seems to be only with Sam's Dot Publishing and Alban Lake Publishing. And then I think Smashwords.com and Amazon.com both have ebooks available. But you can always contact me for copies if you're a little confused or go here.

But you can always get The Holly and the Ivan, Rae's Bar & Bistro, and Uncommon Faire: A Fiction Sideshow through Lulu.com and Amazon.com.

In the mean time, if things are a little tight for you financially, but you've always wanted to read one of the above five books, then I'll make you a deal for the lovely month of August. Hot deal. But it means you're going to have to do some work and be creative.

I want a 150 words - essay, story, logic proof, on the one book you'd like the most of the above. You can tell me why you want it. You can tell me a story about it (fiction or nonfiction), you can set up a logical argument for why you deserve it, you can even write what you think the story is (since I'm assuming you haven't read it yet) and make it completely different. Or write me your own story but my novella or book only makes a cameo in it. Whatever. As long as it's no more than 150 words - that's half a page. Then email that to me at rachelvolivier [at] yahoo dot com (make the obvious adjustments).

If I really like your 150 word essay/story/thing then you could get that book that you wrote about for free. If I really, really like it, then I may ask you if I can post it on my blog with the announcement that you won.

Deadline is midnight Pacific Time Saturday, August 31, 2013. I'll contact winners by the end of September.

So, stay cool and enjoy the rest of the summer!