The Archetypal story and how to keep it fresh

Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey

So ya wanna be a comic book writer, but you're not quite sure how to avoid falling into the trap of creating yet another generic, run-of-the-mill, comic book stereotype that may be interesting to you and your friends, but not quite anyone else.  And that begs the question, how does one find that perfect story, the one that is not only larger than life, but also compelling and socially significant in the long-term?  Well, to get there we must first answer a couple of key questions:

What makes allows one set of stories to clearly strike a chord with the public, while others get dropped by the wayside?  How can my story be both unique and yet culturally significant?

One theory to the answers to these questions can be found in the study of archetypes:

1. The Archetypal Comic Book Plot

Imagine this: a powerful villain has a goal that threatens the balance of our world, or at least a part of it. The superhero intervenes and eventually defeats him/her.

Sandwiched in between this predictable beginning and end are a number of other elements: the motivations of the villain and his machinations to wreak havoc on the world, the hero uncovering the villain's plot bit by bit, the hero's struggle against inner demons while overcoming different challenges along the way. Perhaps the villain teams up with others and we get to witness an interesting power struggle within their ranks. Or maybe the hero teams up with other heroes, and they all fall into conflict before finally figuring out that they need to cooperate to defeat the villain(s).

Recognize this plot outline? Wonder why it's so ubiquitous? You could, of course, try to right a comic book without these elements and come up with a wholly original plot on your hands, but unless you're both lucky and a writing super-genius, it's unlikely that many would be into it. After all, people pay for books because they expect to have a craving satisfied, often in a totally unique way.

Carl Jung uncovered the archetypal
story every culture retells.

The fix they are looking for was described by the Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung in the 1940s - 1960s. After researching cultures from all over the world, he discovered that all stories - sometimes going back thousands of years - display certain common elements. This, he argued, is because our brains work in similar ways: we all have blueprints in our minds that allow us to be human and relate to the world in a uniquely human way. He calls these blueprints "archetypes," and they are the reason why we see the same basic story repeated in all eras and in all places of the world. In his book Man and His Symbols, he describes this archetypal story as:

The universal hero myth, for example, always refers to a powerful man or god-man who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons, serpents, monsters, demons, and so on, and who liberates his people from destruction and death.

These hero myths vary enormously in detail, but the more closely one examines them, the more one sees that structurally they are very similar. They have, that is to say, a universal pattern, even though they were developed by groups or individuals without any direct cultural contact with each other—by, for instance, tribes of Africans or North American Indians, or the Greeks, or the Incas of Peru.

But if every plot is a variation of the same, shared archetypal "dream," how do we diversify our storytelling and escape the trap of boring cliches?

2. The Archetypal Experience in an Uncommon Setting

Our job in becoming highly original storytellers is to create a world and characters so rare, that the audience lives with a sense of constant wonder and discovery. We take our readers far beyond their usual hunting grounds and lead them into a world where the mundane falls away and everything is an adventure. Once we start them on this journey, we ground the reader by relating this exotic world to a universal human experience. The characters in our stories have lives so unlike ours (spies, superhumans, space explorers, etc.), yet they're confronted with conflicts common to our everyday experience (guilt and redemption, change vs tradition, tribalism vs individualism, etc.).  Although these conflicts are being played out with life and death stakes, and in settings that are exotic and dangerous, the best stories will still have some connection to our psyches, to what makes humans 'human.'

Put another way, our strange and alien world becomes a mirror in which we see ourselves and our inner conflicts. But instead of having our conflicts rehashed in the ordinary manner, the struggle is now retold in epic proportions. Our conflicts take the form of the bravest of heroes fighting the most powerful of foes. Our fear of failure becomes a cliff at the edge of the mountain range. Our struggle to succeed becomes the hero's struggle to not be pushed off the cliff, but instead to defeat the villain.

Ultimately, a good story resolves these conflicts in a way that gives us a a deep sense of satisfaction - a feeling, albeit temporary, that everything in our lives actually does make sense and our everyday conflicts are shared by something larger than ourselves. It gives us a cathartic glimpse of what it feels like whenever we try to answer the eternal question that has plagued mankind: how should we lead our lives? (First posed by Aristotle in Ethics.)

In the end, our love for heroic stories comes out of a quest to make sense of the chaos of life.  And if you can give just a glimpse of that in your story, you're that much closer to creating a work that is not only entertaining, but perhaps even meaningful.