Archetypes for Writers: Using the Power of Your Subconscious

By Jennifer Van Bergen

Drawing on her years of training in theater and decades of teaching, Van Bergen unveils the secret of using your own archetypes to find and develop already-existing characters. This approach has... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1932907254
• ISBN13: 9781932907254
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: Michael Wiese Productions
• Length: 241 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.9" x 0.6" x 6.1"

Customer Reviews

Using our subconscious to create more consciously

One of last year's films, Pan's Labyrinth, was acclaimed for its powerful story and images. Writer and director Guillermo del Toro has commented, "When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only means to get to it." He acknowledged using two levels of thought in his work as an artist: "One is conscious and the other unconscious or subconscious..." Jennifer Van Bergen affirms that writing "takes place in the subconscious, which actually operates as an independent mind." In her book, she provides information on how our subconscious works, and details strategies and specific exercises on "doing archetypes" to make more of that "independent mind" available to enrich our writing or other forms of creative expression, and better understand the wealth of our hidden depths.

A journey worth taking

It has now been about six years since I first signed up to take Jennifer Van Bergen's class 'Act to Write' - an earlier incarnation of Archetypes for Writers. The class was online and so I went into it without being able to meet Jennifer in person. At the time there was no book and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I certainly had no idea of the impact that this work would have on my writing and in fact, my life. Immediately I found the material and the class to be riveting. We started with Character Facts and it became clear very quickly that I was not used to separating out what was observable in someone from my own subjective impressions. I was used to describing a person in terms that assumed everyone sees and thinks the way I do. Along with the humbling quality of this discovery, it was also a relief to realize that there was a truth to see when observing people - and that I was being given tools and a framework with which to find that truth. After that class I went on to do advanced work with Jennifer, both in a small group and individually. I am so glad that there is now a book that encapsulates this work and makes it accessible in a way it was not before. The book is set up to guide the reader through the steps of acquiring the necessary tools and then learning how to use them. What also comes across loud and clear in the book is the generosity and excitement that is always a part of Jennifer Van Bergen's teaching method. You can almost hear her talking to you, explaining things and encouraging you. Archetype work not only informs my writing - I read differently, I see people differently on the subway and in the grocery store. It is impossible to forget for one moment that everyone has a story. For me, that's where the life-changing part of this work comes in.

Author comment

I think it's important to point out what I state at several points in my book: that the first several chapters are optional reading. These chapters provide necessary foundational information that, if not stated, would surely be wondered and/or asked about. But I encourage readers to skip ahead directly to the exercises, if they want, and come back to the first chapters to fill in on those principles later. Many of these premises will not be new to writers. They are nonetheless worth stating. On the other hand, some writers may find these chapters confusing until they work through the exercises and sometimes they do not find them useful until they are onto advanced work. I would also like to correct the assertions made by Cinema Crazed Terminal (CCT) about what I say in the book. He writes in his review that I say: "The writer knows the characters more than most people." This is not something I write in the book and it is untrue. While your characters already exist within you, they are in your subconscious. You may not "know" them at all and the process of discovering, developing, and writing them is complex and involved. CCT also writes that "A writer's characters are combinations of the writer's personality, fears, desires, and inhibitions." This is a misunderstanding of the entire archetypes approach. If it were true, one would only need therapy to discover one's characters, and the archetypes approach would be unnecessary. Most importantly, the book provides a skeleton of the process that takes place in discovering and developing your characters. It cannot replace a live class, seminar, or private in-person work, where the participant gets an opportunity to work through the process and make the discoveries which in principle might seem simple, but in practice is often a long journey.

it's not about character creation

The great jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler sometimes dismissed other musicians whose skills outran their motivations by saying, "He thinks it's all about the notes!" I thought of that as I read this book. This book is a guide, yeah, and it's a guide to creating characters in your writing, but it's not just about that. It's about a technical aspect of writing -- who are these figures that populate the work? -- but its emphasis for me is on something much deeper: Who are *you*? Right now, honestly. What is your history, what are your patterns, your habits, your loves and hates? Only if you can learn - and it must be learned -- to see yourself honestly can you learn to see others honestly. And by doing this you do nothing less than come to life, you wake up. Most of us, most of the time, are asleep. This book helped nudge me out of that sleep, and may point me toward more consistent wakefulness, so that I might see myself without judgement, see others without judgement, and thereby come into a clearer vision of the world. It's that clarity that Van Bergen is so good at cultivating, all the while helping writers use that newfound clarity to help midwife an existing truth (the *characters* inside you) into the world. She uses terms that those who have read a lot of writers' guides or self-help guides might find strange, even uncomfortable. She writes plainly, and uncompromisingly, because finding your characters and helping make them real through writing them is a matter of life and death. It's not to be taken lightly; it *matters*. Writing uses words, but in the end it's not *about* words. It contains characters, but it's not merely a field where some arbitrarily chosen personal attributes have been haphazardly thrown together to appear real. Writing is reality. And Van Bergen's book is, in the end, a guide for us to travel through that reality without losing our way.

From the Introduction.

Isaac Stern once said, "Discipline frees the artist." Jennifer Van Bergen, a trained Shakespearean actor, a lawyer, political writer and teacher, is no stranger to discipline or art. Well known for her interviews and other reports on Truthout and CounterPunch online, her writing has a vivid muscularity that cuts to the "quick o' the ulcer," turning over the ground of the subject and quickly exposing the honest underbelly. Archetypes for Writers: Using the Power of Your Subconscious is a call to excellence and a magic breadcrumb trail that leads you there. Early in the narrative, Van Bergen lays bare her revolutionary agenda: "This approach has little to do with how to "create" characters or plot stories. Rather, it is more about how to find your character and story archetypes, or even how to have them find you. Underlying this approach is the premise that each person carries within them a given set of character and story archetypes." Not a new-age technique that asks one to "channel" or "visualize" one's characters, Archetypes for Writers contains a deeply organized set of exercises that puts one on a track to unimagined potential. In the throes of a new script myself, Van Bergen's work came to my attention when I needed it badly. Feeling frustrated with my characters, mired down in the quicksand of my own unwieldy dramatic structure, I was given respite by the opportunity to read the book and by the radical notions contained therein. Although following an instructional pattern appropriate for a how-to book, Van Bergen's passion for social activism and the connection between personal creativity and mindful existence as a citizen of the world becomes clear. One reads the book with new eyes. To the writer who approaches the blank page with trepidation and humility, at once elated and dreading the task, it is a godsend. Within the pages of Archetypes for Writers are ancient terms and concepts as old as human thought. What is world shattering is the extraordinary way that Van Bergen frames the information. One feels that one is having a conversation with a great teacher who is also someone with whom one might want to go out and have a beer - and who hasn't had some of his or her most creative moments in such a setting? However, hanging around drinking beer does not get the story made, the play written, the work composed. The discipline of the writer is the discipline of the human being - to delve and pry and wrench the pieces of the puzzle from the depths of our subliminal selves is not for sissies - to live while awake, with thoughtful attention to the details is the fodder that gives great writing its edge. Archetypes for Writers guides us to the knowledge of what we didn't know that we knew. Van Bergen's own lucid and vibrant writing style has created a treasure that one values as much for the beauty of the language as for the groundbreaking information it carries. Jennifer Van Bergen has demonstrated her own incredible discipline level b