A Reflection on Archetypes

I write these words at a painfully early hour for a Sunday morning, because my choir is performing at the Hyper Japan convention this morning, our soundcheck is at ten past eight, and I must shortly spend an hour on a rail replacement bus to get there. The joys, dear readers, of showbusiness. So a post about the new Superman movie, and its long-inevitable follow-up about the ridiculousness of Jimmy Olsen, is going to have to wait another week, because my brain definitely isn’t functioning well enough to write that right now.

Instead I wanted to ramble about the unexpected lucid literary moment I had last night, when I was walking around my old haunts near University College London and glimpsed the BT Tower. A familiar sight, for a former UCL student, and the star I steered by on most nights: like Coldplay I too found that no matter where I was in London, if I could see the BT Tower I could probably stumble my way home eventually. It’s not surprising, then, that in my longest, most niche unpublished novel, I blew it up. Twice.

And in the way that thoughts do when you’re walking late at night (and when you’ve had a couple of drinks, in fairness), my thoughts turned to that novel. They turned to those characters, sitting idle now for a good 7 years, the first draft of their tasks complete. They turned to that world I built. And as I thought about them I realised just how strong their character arcs were. This is a book where good people stand up against tyranny, a book about good people becoming, to varying degrees, heroes. This is a book where those good people have their roots very firmly in some of the oldest stories of the vaguely-British mythos, where many readers will have Opinions, explicit or subconscious, about how those heroes should behave.

And the more I thought about the way I wrote them all those years ago the more I thought that I captured them pretty well, actually – I think my versions fulfilled those core, long-established tropes of what these characters should be. There is a man who seeks perfection in himself, though he’d never say it aloud; damn good at what he does, without arrogance, but falling short of his own standards. His old story forces him to confront that drive for perfection and rise above it, realise that he doesn’t have to reach that standard – and multiple times throughout my new story he has to face that in himself, overcome a new perceived failing, be better without having to be the best. There is a woman who, in her old tale, is relegated suddenly to her sibling’s shadow; has to scramble to prove a worth she thought she had nailed down already. I actually removed the sibling, in my version; the shadow she must escape, the worth she must prove, is to her father instead. And her father – he might be one of my favourite characters of all; a man who has fought hard all his life to make a better world for his children and has to accept, however reluctantly, that he must let his children take on their share of the danger to see it through. And then there is the perfect warrior undone by love, and the ancient sage undone by trust, and a king who must earn his mantle, and many more besides. And honestly? The more I thought about their arcs, the more I thought about the archetypes I was echoing, consciously or not, the more I thought I’d done it quite well.

Now whether any of this is actually true or not remains to be seen. Whether I actually convey any of these arcs on the page, whether what’s in my head properly made it out, I don’t know. I won’t know until I get some other people to read this old book, I suppose. But I think, honestly, that these characters might be the best I’ve ever captured in paper and ink. They are archetypal, however much I’ve deviated from those archetypes or built them up in my head as something the source material may not really have supported. And their journey is a hard and bloody one but it is a damn good one all the same.

I’m going to have to fix up The Future King, aren’t I? All 350,000 words of it. Bugger. I thought I’d be able to take it easy now the trilogy’s complete.

A writer’s work is never done.