The excellent Film Courage interviews Jeffrey Alan Schechter who claims Every Great Story Has A Main Character That Goes Through 4 Archetypes.
He explains the six Jungian archtypes:
“The most concise and well constructed version of this came from the book “Hero Within” by a person named Carol S. Pearson…. She was a psychologist who wrote a self-help book with the idea, and the hero within I think it’s like six archetypes we live by. Her idea was that you can define yourself by one of these six archetypes which was like warrior, wanderer, orphan, martyr, innocent, magician, there we go I actually got them all.”
Jeffrey is big on the number four. To him, every film answers four questions, in four acts:
He reviews movies on his website, mystorycanbeatupyourstory.com, and illustrates the four questions and four archetypes well. Just click on any film you know to see what I mean.
The four questions:
- Who is your main character?
- What are they trying to accomplish?
- Who is trying to stop them?
- What happens if they fail?
The protagonist will move through four of these six archetypes, one state in each of the four acts:
- Orphan
- Wanderer
- Warrior
- Martyr
- Magician
- Innocent
My take: fascinating! As someone very curious about storytelling, I love all the various theories on structure and the various rules and edits around screenwriting. Oh yeah, he also says there should be 44 plot points.