haHA we have caught up. Good job, team.
August’s prompt is: What character type always appears?
We’ve talked about character archetypes here on the blog before. But I suspect what the question is actually asking is what sorts of characters do I tend to use in my own stories.
Hold on, let me think.
That’s a hard one. On one hand, you want to be like, “Oh no, I don’t have character types, everyone is a unique and special snowflake because each story is unique and different!” But on the other hand, that’s a load of crap. Humans are creatures of habit; we have things we like and patterns we fall into, and that includes writers as much as everyone else.
I went back and looked at my archetype posts to see if that was going to help, but kind of the point of the posts was that there’s a lot of variation to what counts as an archetype, and that characters can be different archetypes at different points in the story, so, uh, it wasn’t. Helpful.
But I am having a hard time thinking of characters that I use in all, or even most, stories. Are there repetitions across all my stories? Oh, absolutely. But ones for all or most stories? Not as much.
I guess I have a sweet spot for goofy sidekicks, but that’s really uneven. I do like my characters to have siblings, especially older ones, but even that’s only a handful of stories. Animal sidekicks? That’s, uh, at least two stories. Maybe only two stories. Frustrating mentors? That might actually only be one story (Across Worlds with You, currently coming out once a month at Turtleduck Press) but I really like her.
Maybe it’s more obvious to someone else looking at my stories, or maybe if I consciously took every character from every novel/novella I’d ever written and put them next to each other, the patterns would be easy to see. I suspect a lot of my main characters tend to be fairly similar in personality (which we shall call “Kit MC Personality Alpha” because why not) but I’m not sure how exactly I would quantify them.
So, uh, I don’t know! But it’s nice to have a prompt that’s new and actually made me think for a bit.
See you Thursday, squiders!
