By Melanie Anne Phillips
Creator of StoryWeaver

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Write Your Novel or Screenplay Step By Step

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Copyright Melanie Anne Phillips - Owner, Storymind.com, Creator Storyweaver, Co-creator Dramatica

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Thousands of writers use StoryWeaver to build their story’s world, characters, plot, theme,
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Thousands of writers use Dramatica to find and refine their story’s structure and to find and fix holes and missteps.

• 200 Interactive Story Cards guide you from concept to completion, step by step.

• Help Buttons with Writing Tips, Example Stories, Hints, and Tricks.

• Work on multiple stories at once.

• Jot down creative notes from anywhere in StoryWeaver.

• Placeholder: Pick up writing where you left off.

• Develop multiple levels of detail for your plot and characters.

• Intuitive navigation path helps you follow your Muse.

• Works on any device: desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, Windows, Macintosh, iOs, Android & Chrome

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• Patented Story Engine cross- references your dramatic choices to create a structure map.

• AI style narrative model finds holes, missteps and suggests how to fix & fill them.

• Automatically generates a timeline from your story’s structural map.

• Offers three levels of detail depending on the complexity of your story.

• Includes hundreds of examples, tips, tricks, and techniques.

• Comes with more than sixty structural maps for classic and popular novels, movies and stage plays.

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~ Step 53 ~

Structural Roles

You've already chosen a protagonist and an antagonist, but those are not the only structural roles you can assign to your characters.  In the hero's journey there are structural archetypes such as The Mentor, The Threshold Guardian, The Herald, The Shape Shifter, The Shadow, and The Trickster.  Other Archetypes include the Sidekick, the Skeptic, the Love Interest, the Sage, the Fool, the Caregiver, Reason, Emotion, and many, many more.

Don’t be worried that giving a character an archetypal role will diminish its humanity and make it stilted or stereotypical.  Selecting an archetypal role for each character gives that character a center and an important dramatic function in the story, rather than being there for entertainment only.

For more information on Archetypes, search the web for "Hero's Journey," "Joseph Campbell Archetypes," "Carl Jung Archetypes," “Dramatica Archetypes,” etc.  Or, read Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Chris Vogler's "The Hero's Journey," or Dramatica: A New Theory of Story.

For this step, review your cast of characters and if possible, select an archetypal role for each.  List each character, the archetypal role you are assigning to it, and a brief description of how that role pertains to its actions in your plot (referring to your story synopsis).