45 Master Characters: Mythic Models for Creating Original Characters
45 Master Characters: Mythic Models for Creating Original Characters offers heroic and villainous sub-types of 8 female and 8 male archetypes, along with 4 Friend archetypes, 6 Rival archetypes, and 3 Symbol archetypes. The author connects each of the main archetypes to a figure from Greek or Egyptian myth, and describes in depth the characteristics of that archetype: what they care about, what they fear, what motivates them, and how other characters see them. She then shows how to tweak the character, take it a bit too far, and craft a villainous version.
This page will serve as the index for at least three pages (one for the Heroes, one for the Heroines, and one for the other archetypes).
Compare Heroes and Heroines.
Notes
- I have the book here, but I don't understand it as much as I would like to understand it; therefore, my summary is a little suspect, but I don't think I'll stray too far from the basic idea. Once I understand it better, I'll check these pages, clarify the concepts, and remove this notice.
- Since these characters overlap to some degree with Enneagram types and the Heroes and Heroines archetypes, I'll note whenever these ties are particularly clear.
- As I said on the Heroes and Heroines page, I'm still trying to understand the world of copyright infringement; I hope I haven't gone too far in my summary, but to do much less than this would make the summary of little use on a site like TV Tropes. I'm pretty sure I'm within my rights to explain all the archetypes and relate them to the tropes on this site.
45 Master Characters: Mythic Models for Creating Original Characters by Victoria Lynn Schmidt; published by Writer's Digest Books (www.writersdigest.com), 2007.
- ISBN 1-58297-069-6
- ISBN 978-1-58297-069-1