This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the helping writers become authors podcast.

I hope you enjoy this week's episode,

Archetypes and story structure, how they're connected.

By its very nature, story structure is archetypal. It is a pattern we recognize emerging from story.

It is a pattern as big as life itself, and therefore one about which we are always learning more.

But it is also a pattern we have been able to distill into specific systems that help us consistently recreate these deeply resonant

archetypes in story after story. In studying story structure and character

arcs, one of the coolest things I've realized is that these archetypal patterns show up in surprising ways.

We spent a good part of last year studying what I call the life

arts consisting of six primary transformative character archetypes and 18 supporting archetypes.

These archetypal character arcs can be seen to make up the overall arc of a human life,

beginning with the coming of age arc of youth, and traveling all the way to the final challenges of confronting and embracing the mysteries of life and death.

Not only do these innate journeys expand the options for archetypal journeys far beyond the beloved

heroes journey, they also offer an amazing zoomed out view of the common pattern of story structure itself.

Now I reference this in the original series about archetypal character arcs, but as I'm now working on a book version of the subject,

I realized this phenomenon deserves to be examined more specifically. So today I want to highlight two different angles of this.

Angle number one, the cycle of the six archetypal character arcs shows us as humans how life itself is structured like a story.

And angle number two, the cycle also shows us as writers how the story structure in any individual book can be strengthened

by recognizing that each of the classic structural beats mirrors specific archetypal chapters in life itself.

Now I like patterns. I particularly like the spiral, a pattern that repeats itself an infinite

expansion. It's a pattern we find everywhere in life. So why should story theory

be any different?

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