You're Not Stuck. You're in the Wrong Archetype

When I first went into business as a writer, I hated anything to do with marketing. “I am a writer,” I thought. “Dammit, I will not be sullied by such lowly demands as marketing,” dramatically punctuating with my finger for emphasis.

I didn’t quite speak like that, but I felt that way. Marketing felt sleazy, slimy, deceptive – everything I didn’t want to be associated with. Discussions around marketing made me anxious, and I would do anything to avoid the topic.

So you can imagine that when I started dating a marketer, it became more frustrating and even more difficult to avoid. I would insist that it’s not about the dollars, it’s about the art.

It was the study of archetypes that finally broke me out of this place. Archetypes are recurrent symbols, or in our case, characters in culture, literature, art, or mythology. Archetypes can be notions like “good” and “evil,” or they can be persona types like “hero,” “sage,” “creator,” “maverick,” “teacher,” etc. Think of archetypes like temporary masks you can put on and take off to embody a different kind of energy.

We see archetypes all the time. Steve Jobs is the classic visionary. Any Navy SEAL is probably a mix of hero and warrior. Writers are an archetype, engineers are an archetype, because we have culturally and personally associated meanings with those images. It doesn’t mean that person religiously adheres to the archetype, but it means they carry some of the energy and feeling of that archetype with them.

When you think of the archetype of writer, you probably think of someone who likes to read, might wear glasses, could be a little socially awkward, and is very smart. When you think of a football player, you think athletic, big, good at leading, and good at working with a team.

The application to the broader scope of creative work is not immediately obvious. Archetypes in storytelling — hero, shadow, trickster, wise elder — are old news. Every MFA student has heard of them, along with almost everyone who writes for business. But I’m not talking about using archetypes as a sorting system for your clients. I’m talking about something a little stranger and more useful than that.

Start with yourself. What archetype are you operating from when you write? Not what you want to be, but what you actually are, right now, in your creative life.

Some writers are clearly Creators: generative, idea-drunk, excited by the blank page. Some are Sages: drawn to research, to rigor, to understanding something deeply before they’ll commit it to language. Some are Outlaws: they can only write against something and they need a target. They work best when they’re blowing something up.

Knowing which one you are goes further than a strengths diagnostic; it gives you a way to see how you get stuck. The Creator who can generate fifty ideas will often have a drawer full of unfinished drafts. They cannot for the life of them choose one thing and stick with it long enough to finish it. The Sage who researches endlessly may never feel ready to begin, and might always carry the insecure blush of someone who is convinced they don’t know enough. The Outlaw who needs a target will sometimes manufacture conflict where there isn’t any, because that’s the only condition under which they know how to work. Your archetype doesn’t just describe what you’re good at. It describes the specific flavor of your self-sabotage.

Then there’s a second question, which is the more interesting one: what archetype does your work want you to be?

This sounds a little mystical and I mean it to. Every project has its own demands, and its own energy. A memoir about survival might require you to step into the Warrior — someone who can hold the weight of the story without flinching. But it might also require you to be the Innocent, someone who can step into a situation with fresh eyes and see what the Warrior might miss in their zeal. An essay collection on grief might need the Caregiver, or the Innocent, or both at different times. A novel that’s been resisting you for two years might be resisting because you keep trying to write it from the wrong archetype. You keep showing up as the Sage who’s got it all figured out when the story needs you to be the Fool, the one who stumbles blindly in.

The gap between the archetype you’re operating from and the one the work requires is often where writers get stuck. It feels like a craft problem, or a plot problem, or a voice problem. It’s usually none of those things. It’s an identity problem, or at the very least an energy problem. The work is asking you to inhabit an energy you don’t naturally reach for.

I notice this in my own Substack writing. I can get wrapped up in the archetype I think I’m supposed to be here: the Teacher, or the Sage. Those archetypes can easily adopt a certain kind of armor, which can lead to stiff writing and a bored voice over time. Sometimes I have to show up as the Idiot or the Fool and share something that exposes me, pushes me, or reveals something about me just to break through.

This is also true when we’re developing characters for fiction or nonfiction, though in a more nuanced way than the standard “give your character an archetype” advice suggests. The more useful question isn’t what archetype is your character… it’s what archetype are they trying to become, and what stands in the way. A character who presents as a Hero but secretly wants to be the Hermit, to be left alone, to stop being responsible for everything, is infinitely more interesting than a character who simply is a Hero. The longing to cross from one archetype into another is where most human drama actually lives.

Below, I’ve written out how I worked with these ideas. I’m a big fan of tools, so the two tools I used for this exercise were Archetypes in Branding and The Hero and the Outlaw, by Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson. You can read those books or you can easily search for a list of archetypes on your own. Here’s a list you can start with.

• Think about your creative life and your relationship to your work. Which archetype shows up when writing is going well? Which one tends to appear when you’re avoiding the page? Which archetype starts the project, and which one finishes it? Which one shows up half-way through it?

• Think about the archetype your current project seems to want from you. What energy does the work call for? Are you bringing it, or are you bringing something easier or different? A companion question: What archetype did you believe you were supposed to embody when you started this project?

• Look at the characters or subjects you’re drawn to write about across multiple projects. Is there a pattern? Most writers return, again and again, to the same two or three tensions and questions. That’s not a rut. That’s your subject matter. The question is whether you’re writing toward it consciously, and whether the archetypes you embody are allowing you to work with those topics.

• Think about where you feel the most resistance in your creative process. Resistance almost always marks an archetypal threshold, a place where the work is asking you to step into an energy that feels unfamiliar or unsafe. You don’t have to cross every threshold. But it helps to know which ones you’re avoiding, and why.

One last thing worth considering: the archetype you most resist in your writing is often the one with the most to offer you. The Sage who can never stop researching and start writing might need a dose of the Fool. To be the Fool, you have to be willing to be wrong, to be unfinished, to fall flat. To make a fool of yourself. The Rebel or Outlaw who can only write in opposition might find that the Caregiver unlocks something they didn’t know was there.

The point of working with these archetypes is to develop flexibility in how you approach your creative work. You don’t have to abandon who you are, or the archetypes you gravitate toward or yearn to embody. But you do get to stop letting them be the only energy available to you.