We hear the adage “know thyself” all the time, but what no one tells you is that there is an inherent difficulty in knowing yourself, beyond that of knowing someone else. An occultist once explained it to me this way: an eye can only see itself with the aid of a mirror. Without that mirror, the eye can never perceive itself. It can perceive others, the world around it, but never its own nature. Thus, if we are to get anywhere with knowing ourselves, we have to discover or develop tools.
Most writers use writing as a way of getting to know themselves. And there’s no doubt that this works. Writing—whether it be journalling, fiction writing, poetry, or some other form—allows the writer to make external what was once only internal, to take the secret inner jewel out of its cloth of flesh and turn it about in the light, examine it, and learn some of its properties. But there is a catch with this: getting better as a writer, learning how to delve deeper into the secret inner cave, requires you to develop a different form of self-knowledge, a type that writing itself does not easily afford.
So, if you are one of those people who knows how good writing is for you, who can feel its benefits, but equally has struggled to tune into the current, to channel it, to produce good work, to feel like you are flowing in the right genre and with the right sustainable habits, then the following tool is for you!
Christa Wojciechowski is not only a close friend of mine, but one of the best novelists I’ve ever met. Her Sculptor series is a tour de force of psychological insight. Is it any wonder, then, that she has just released a deeply psychologically insightful tool, modelled on Jungian archetypes.
This tool, known as Write Catalyst, helps writers to discover which of twelve mythic archetypes they belong to. Each archetype behaves differently and is looking for different things in the act of writing. This last piece of the puzzle is, to my mind, the most key. There is an assumption that all writers are looking to get the same thing out of their writing; that, or that the act of writing is itself the only reward. But neither of these are true. Writing is as a means to an end. And while, yes, enjoyment of the process is paramount, this only comes through understanding what our deeper drive is.
So, what type of writer are you?
The Mystic, The Rebel, The Explorer, The Sage, The Dreamer, The Warrior, The Healer, The Creator, The Guardian,
The Lover, The Jester, or The Every Man?
Find out by taking the test. It’s free and only takes about 3 or 4 minutes, and then you get your report.
As it happens, I am a Mystic writer, which means my core desire is: “To serve as a bridge between the spiritual and material worlds, translating cosmic revelations into accessible stories”.
This may sound high-falutin, even a little pretentious, but it’s true of how I think about the world. I’ve always believed my stories came from somewhere else; I was just the monk /scribe writing them down. I even wrote a non-fiction book about creative inspiration and channeling the divine, so I suppose it was inevitable this would turn out to be my underlying motivation.
So, what is your archetype? If you feel brave, share your result in the comments below. And don’t hesitate to check out the other incredible features on the Write Catalyst website. Christa is an experienced writer who has been in the trenches and experienced all the pain and vicissitudes of trying to make art in the modern world, and I think she sincerely wants to save other writers the pain of what she’s had to go through, and help everyone gain that self-knowledge which is hard-won but totally without price.
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