![]() Two examples from Jane Austen novels: George Wickham of Pride & Prejudice and Lucy Steele of Sense and Sensibility:īoth are schemers who bring a great deal of heartache to the protagonists of their stories.īut without Wickham and his schemes, it’s highly unlikely that Elizabeth would have changed her opinion of Darcy. Which means the trickster is often (though not always) the best thing that ever happened to your protagonist. While it’s typical to assume that tricksters will function as antagonists-and they certainly can-whether friend or foe, they are usually the agent for a profound change in your protagonist.Ģ. It’s also a great way to jump-start your protagonist’s character arc, because people don’t change until they HAVE to change. This is a great way to use character to get your plot moving. They land in the middle of the mundane and shake things up. This is the most important function of the trickster in a story. ![]() When the chief tried to mediate, the god showed up and admitted what he did, declaring he loves to create strife. The two farmers came to blows, still arguing about the color of the god’s hat. Edshu then made things worse by turning the hat around and walking through the village the other way. A farmer on one side of the village claimed he saw the god in a blue hat, and another other swore he saw him in a red hat. Edshu painted a hat blue on one side and red on the other, then put it on and walked through a village. Mythologist Joseph Campbell, during his famous The Power of Myth interviews with Bill Moyers, recounted the story of Edshu, a Nigerian trickster god. Here are some things to keep in mind about the trickster archetype while composing your own stories:ġ. Let’s start with one of my all-time favorite archetypes, the trickster. But archetypes are a wonderful tool in the writer’s arsenal, and, as I hope to demonstrate, their use is only limited by the author’s own creativity and imagination. Writers are sometimes wary of archetypes, worried they will lead to characters that come off as unoriginal. ![]() a constantly recurring symbol or motif in literature, painting, etc.(psychoanalysis) one of the inherited mental images postulated by Jung as the content of the collective unconscious.an original model or pattern prototype.
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