Sajani Tails

Building your story.

      I’ve mentioned a few times that these journals are very stream of consciousness for me. Last post is a good example of that. I merged something without thinking, but it’s easy enough to fix.

      The next archetype from the monomyth I’m going to talk about is the herald. This is the person, place, thing or event (can I call it a noun?) that starts the hero on her journey. It’s very rare this role Is played by a single instance. More often, there are several things that come together. Taking a well-known example from the Lord of Rings, Gandalf is a pretty obvious herald. He recognizes the danger and sets Frodo and eventually the fellowship on the path of their adventure. But there are a lot of other heralds happening in the background. Boromir’s dream for instance. Bilbo’s discovery of the ring also qualifies. The council of Elrond, both the chapter and the participants act in a way to set the hero on his journey.

      A lot of emphasis gets placed on the herald being a character, but more often, it’s a series of events. In The Difference Engine, the role is played by a stack of computer punch cards in an ornate box. (William Gibson does some really weird things with the monomyth).

      In my series, Benayle plays the role of herald, sort of. He’s there when Sajani starts her journey, but it’s the invasion of the elves into Zenache that’s the true herald. Faux Scent has a strange herald as well, since it doesn’t appear until about halfway through the book. Rana escaping from jail is the strongest herald of events in the story, although there are some minor hints along the way.

      So, let’s take a look at what happens if you have no herald—nothing. Nothing happens because you have no purpose for telling your story. Remember what I said last time about a lot of these elements being present, not because of some mystical or scientific reason, but because without them you don’t have a story? Well, herald is one like that. You probably include one without prompting but having a term for it gives you a way to compartmentalize the concept and flesh it out a little more.

      When filled by a character, herald and mentor often go together. I kind of merged them in my last post without thinking. When that happens you often see the character traveling with the hero and giving advice. This can lead to a potential weakness in your story. Realize that if you rely on your mentor/herald too much, it weakens the success of the hero. This might be intentional, but many times when I see it, I’m pretty sure that was unintentional. It’s impossible for me to make my point by referencing something without it being a huge spoiler, so I’ll tell you what to look for and you can find it easily on your own.

      Did your favorite character die? Well, there’s usually only two reason for it and the biggest reason is that the hero’s success will seem so much greater if it’s done without aid. Take a look at Lord of the Rings. At the big scene at the climax, Frodo ends up figuratively alone. There are two other characters in the scene, but when the final decision is being made, Frodo makes it entirely on his own. It’s a fairly common pattern and one to consider in your writing. You don’t have to isolate like that, but you should at least realize that anyone else involved shares that victory, spreading it out. Sajani’s victories are always shared; her losses are always individual and deeply personal. It was a conscious decision early on.

      The next archetype will show off my love for what I like to think of as the old Disney. While the archetype is still used in almost all movies since the early seventies, the role has degenerated and gone kind of shallow. I’m talking about what the monomyth refers to as the trickster and is often viewed as the comic relief. The trickster is the one that acts as a bit of a literary foil and often inhibits the hero in ways that are unintentional and often amusing. Jacques and Gus in Cinderella are good examples. The allow Cinderella to show off her compassion and empathy, but also land themselves into trouble that distracts her from her ultimate goal. The comic relief part is obvious. “Gus Gus.” As is often the case with the trickster, in the end they help her succeed.

      Another great example is Thumper in Bambi. The rabbit causes his own brand of trouble and we get a few laughs along the way. You’ll find that type of character in almost all animated Disney movies. Early on they tended to be fully fleshed characters, but slowly they became more and more shallow and degenerated into more comic than actual relief. The role is played all over the place in my books, with no character having a corner on it, but mostly you find it being played out by Fenther, Simon, and Tess. The tricksters that tend to stand out are like that: they’re characters in their own right and have some important role in the story. You can use the shallow method and, like so many other things I talk about, it’s not wrong to do that and there are times when you’ll want a shallow trickster, so as to not outshine your hero.

      That’s about all for this week. I’ll cover the shapeshifter and the shadow next time. It’s a little weird switching from the furry sites to my own site and losing the following I worked so hard for, but this is a lot easier and helps me feel a bit more established.

      Thank you to anyone that’s followed me here. I’ll miss comments, since I doubt many will bother registering to make them, but you can always email me: chaaya dot chandra at outlook dot com. There’s also an interview of me on http://willbly.com Feel free to support that site.

      May you keep running forward and never look back.

 

Choosing the right templates.

      In 1871 anthropologist Edward Burnette Tylor proposed that mythology and literature often follow a specific pattern. Eventually this pattern would be filtered and added upon by several others and eventually solidified by Joseph Campbell. It would come to be known as the monomyth or “the hero's journey."

      For the next weeks I'll be doing a little bit of a run down on this theory, including my personal thoughts and criticisms on it. I hope you'll find these things useful in your writing. I use the term archetype to cover a broad spectrum, from the anthropomorphism of set character traits to the flow of the story.

      Let me start by saying that I don't fully support this theory. From a folklore standpoint, for instance, it shows a severe amount of selective sampling. There are several myths and theologies that only fit if you use a large hammer. What parts do match aren't part of any grand unification theory for literature so much as they're simply a part of the human condition and, to us, are the purpose of telling a story.

      It's not that all good stories have contained those things. It's more that if you remove some of those things, you defeat the purpose of telling the story. They are core things that I can comfortably say you should do in a certain way. I'll get to that at a later journal, provided I don't get… squirrel!

      Some of the metaphysical crap that's been attached to it… well, by wording it that way, I think I gave you my opinion. I do believe in some metaphysical things, but the hocus pocus attached to the monomyth is a little over the top for me. Like I said, there's nothing special about having things a certain way in the story. It's just the purpose of telling the story—nothing more or less than that.

      I'll start by explaining the concept of character archetypes in a story. A character archetype is a little like a template for designing your characters. Just like a basic template, it gives you an outline, but leaves additional details up to you. You'll hear some different definitions than mine. Hear them out but remember Chaaya's first rule of writing: There are no hard rules.

      As with a lot of things we've talked about; this is something that can be overdone. Like the first Sword of Shannara books, where you can point to each character in turn and say, “This one is Bilbo and this one is Gandalf…" you can rely too much on the template and take away any chance of creating depth to your characters. There's no depth when you can see the bottom. That's where my “gives you an outline" comment is coming from. When you use these archetypes be careful to fill in the inside yourself.

      I'll start with the hero. The MC. The personification of yourself in the story (unless you're me. I'm not Sajani). According to Joseph Campbell, the hero needs to go through some trials and then come out different than when she started. Seriously? It took a scholar to come up with that? The difference can be subtle (it is in the first two Sajani Tails) or it can be fairly drastic, like it is A Ship Called Hope. I've used the term before: Bildungsroman. That's what is expected of your hero. To be honest though: if you end in the exact same place you started, with no change to the character or the environment, then why did you bother trying to tell a story?

      The reason I'm covering this, even though they are pretty obvious, is to make you more conscious of their presence. It can help the planning or the pantsing if you are actively thinking of the role your characters might be playing in each scene. It can also confuse the crap out of you, in which case, ignore me.

      There are more specifics to the plot, but I'll cover that when I cover… plot.

      The next archetype I'll cover is the mentor. I learned this archetype as the old man, but I guess it's mentor now. In my books it's the same every time—it's Benayle. This is the person that guides the hero through her journey or acts as an advisor. I'll mention it here because it's going to come up later, but a particular character can fill more than one role and you can have multiple characters filling a role as well. That's true of the hero as well.

      Also, the archetypes don't necessarily have to be filled by a person. Benayle isn't around to help Sajani directly in the Ship series. So while he does fill the mentor role by sending help and fighting the opposition on his end of things, I use a series of books that Gregor and Sajani have read as a way to give advice they need—The Prequel to Alpha series. The hero of those books is very similar to Benayle and the young pair learns from and receives encouragement from the books.

      This archetype is almost a no-brainer for showing up
in your book. Let's say you're writing a book about someone going on a lunch break (don't laugh. It's been done) and the server hands the hero a menu. Guess what? The hero learned something from that menu. That menu could be called a mentor archetype. So could the server.

      We've covered two archetypes today and hopefully you can see what I've meant about not being impressed with the theory. I chose these two in particular because not only are they among the first you'll encounter in a tale, they're also two that you will most likely automagically have in your story. (There is a case of a book where there's a main character that isn't a hero and makes no change over the course the story. It's called The Difference Engine. It seriously bucks all of this.)

      Next week, I'll get into other archetypes—some that you'd be hard pressed to leave out and some that are fun to have, like the trickster.

      As always, thank you so much to my few followers. I do this for you. Hopefully it gives you some insight into new ways to enhance your writing. You can find additional information on the internet about this topic. I suggest doing a search for “Glove and Boots: hero's journey." I don't recommend the Wikipedia article. It's pretty awful.

      May you keep running forward and never look back.

This post was done a while ago and posted to the sites I used to frequent, so the follow up to it will be faster than usual.