Archetypes in Writing, and Animal People

I’m finishing Carolyn Myss’s book on archetypes—it’s a big one—and it’s got me thinking about types of people, and the various parts of a personality and how some people seem born one way or another or they grow into one way or another. In writing, we have to be careful not to generalize archetypes or stereotypes. Elizabeth’s posted about how she’s an animal person—which is totally a personality archetype, I think, which I also have and so does Elizabeth and definitely Zetta.

I think the qualities of animal people, besides just loving them and not being afraid, is fiercely wanting to protect them. (Steve Erwin’s the epitome of this.) When I was little, we had the best dog. She was mostly schnauzer and totally hyper and loving and fun and crazy and I totally miss her. Once, I absolutely refused to go on a family vacation because my parents were going to bard her, and I was sure she’d be emotionally traumatized and I wouldn’t go, period.

Then there was the time I decided to save all the goldfish from imprisonment by the town carnies at the town carnival. You know the game at fairs where you throw the ping-pong ball into colored water in a little fish bowl and win a gold fish? I was appalled, and took it upon myself to liberate them all. I gathered all the money I could and ran away from my mother at the fair and tried to win every single gold fish. My mother thought I’d been kidnapped and was presently meeting a horrendous demise, got on the phone with the police and was generally having a total meltdown when I walked into our back gate carrying about 6,593 plastic bags of goldfish. I named them all Jaws. Jaws 1, Jaws 2, etc. And I loved them all.

A few years ago, I went to a psychic—for a writing class assignment. The lesson was on stereotypes in creative writing. You can’t just make every single sailor a womanizing drinker, and you can’t make every psychic in your stories a turban-wearing crystal ball gazer. Our teacher made us pick a stereotype out of a hat, go interview and write a story with the character—using the interview from a real live person who did whatever (one woman picked “prostitute”—and she wrote an awesome story after interviewing a hooker).

I chose the psychic. The woman I interviewed had shelves of stuffed teddy bears and bright flowery wallpaper in her office. We did the reading in her back yard while she caught a frog in her pool. So, she's proof that not everyone who has an archetype (the psychic) fits a stereotype.

She told me that my boyfriend’s dog, who’d passed away a few weeks before, wanted to talk to me. Really—of all the important messages waiting for me from beyond death, she was like “You’re dead great-aunt Margaret is asking me to tell you you’ve inherited a genetic disposition for lung cancer from your mother’s side. Oh, and Dan’s dog Jessie wants the family to know she’s fine, she’s on the other side and has made a new collie friend. They have lots of room to run and her arthritis is gone now.”

Anyway—it was a great writing assignment. I wrote a poem about the goldfish incident once (now a legendary family story), but I’m not so thrilled with it, so I need to re-do it. I’ll make myself a note to mine that whole psychic/frog/Aunt Margaret/dog thing for some material, too.