Over at Romancing the Blog on Friday, there was a column written by Diana Peterfreund (Secret Society Girl) that was a skit about the female archetypes.  She did one a while back on the hero archetypes, too.  The posts are funny and clever and touch on the basics of the archetypes and how we might generalize or stereotype them. Looking at them this way-in the brief skit - it’s fun to see the obvious distinctions between the archetypes.  The thing is, characters, just like people, don’t have only one character trait or one way in which they are defined.  This is what we, at Chasing Heroes, have found most challenging in creating this site.  Our focus is on looking at the archetypes and identifying fabulous heroes and doing Hero Profiles.  But more often than not, these heroes fall into more than one category.  That’s the beauty of a larger than life hero: they’re complex and layered. 

Diana mentioned the ‘bomb in a basement’ text. 

“If you read the Cowden book or take the class, you learn that the real test of archetype is not so much their personality, but their behavior. You could have a character that looks and talks and walks like a librarian - that works at a library! - but if you lock her in a basement with a bomb and she uses, say, sex appeal, rather than book knowledge, to get out, she’s actually a seductress.” 

I love the idea of the ‘bomb in a basement’ because it allows us to really challenge our characters and let them reveal themselves to us.  If our hero walks and talks like a professor (ala Diana’s example of the librarian), but he strong-arms his way out of the basement rather than using his smarts to disarm the bomb and/or reveal or capture the one who put him there, is he then a warrior and not a professor?   

I think that if a character has been a professor all along, he’d be acting wildly out of character if he suddenly used brute strength to solve a problem.  An editor sure better have caught that!  But I do think it’s perfectly fine if our professor uses strength (or something other than smarts) if he’s exhibited bits of this strength during other parts of the book. 

Tami Cowden’s ‘bomb in a basement’ test is a great one and one that we should all use as a method of letting our characters reveal themselves to us.  But if something is revealed about him or her that surprises us, maybe it’s not that our hero/heroine is acting out of character, but that we need to infuse more character into him/her, thereby creating complexity. 

Question of the Day:

As a reader, have you ever read a book that had a glaring inconsistency in a character’s personality that you just couldn’t reconcile?  Might the ‘bomb in a basement’ test have alerted the author to the problem?