The Hero's Journey can be
a powerful plotting framework for genre fiction. For more than a year, I've
been teaching workshops on it, and in July, at the Harriette Austin Writers
Conference, I expanded the workshop, folded in material about archetypal
characterizations, and deepened the power of this plotting and characterization
tool. Yesterday I presented the full workshop for the Carolina Romance Writers
in Charlotte. With me are board member Martha Catt (L) and chapter
president Virginia Farmer.

Audience interaction always makes this topic new and fun. As
attendees absorb the material, I can see them make connections — not just with
movies they've seen and books they've read, but with their own material. They
squirm, anxious to go home, apply the concepts, fix their manuscripts, write.
And they think of additional ways to build on the concepts I've taught.

Toward the end of yesterday's session, one
attendee asked if we could identify all of Christopher Vogler's original seven
major archetypal characters in the original Star Wars movie. Archetypes are like masks that characters can put on
and take off, so one character can embody more than one archetype in a book or
movie. Here are characters and archetypes that we identified. What do you think?

• Hero: Luke Skywalker
• Herald: R2D2, Imperial storm troopers
• Mentor: Obi-Won Kenobi, the violence of the Empire
• Threshold guardian: the desert, the Sand People, the
  Jawas, possibly also Luke's uncle and aunt
• Shapeshifter: Han Solo, Chewbacca
• Shadow: Governor Tarkin, the Death Star (Note: in
  this particular movie, Darth Vader and the Emperor were more in the background, like minions)
• Trickster: C3PO, Han Solo, Chewbacca

Totally off-topic, while I was in
Charlotte, I stayed in the little apartment above Martha Catt's garage.
Peaceful in there. No Internet, no phone, no TV. It's the perfect place for a
frazzled writer to hole up for about two weeks when she desperately needs to
finish a manuscript but keeps getting interrupted (sez I, about 95% finished
with the first draft of Regulated for Murder). Martha employed some
ingenious space-saving techniques when furnishing the apartment. Like the
drawer pictured. She designed it to fit exactly into that "useless"
corner space where two kitchen cabinets meet. And the cabinet below it is just
as accessible through clever design. Martha's archetype is obviously the Wise
Woman.