Over the past month or so, we’ve been talking about pacing, story goals, and stakes, but I want to pause and get personal today, because the kinds of stories we’re drawn to aren’t arbitrary.
They’re often expressions of archetypes that carry real charge for us as individuals, whether we’ve named them or not.
When you identify the archetypes that speak deeply to you, they become wellsprings of surprisingly potent energy, and when you channel this energy into your writing, you’re not manufacturing meaning—you’re tapping into something that’s already alive.
Throughout my 2025 adventures in learning how to improve my pacing and romantic tension, at one point I set aside all the craft books and post-its and asked myself, What actually matters to me when I’m writing? Like flicking on a movie projector, I was flooded with images and sensations, all woven together by a crystal-clear theme.
My personal archetype is…
My One Ring to Rule Them All is People Coming Together. (Henceforth, I shall call it PCT, so I don’t have to keep typing that out.) This is any depiction of folks choosing to work together for the betterment of everyone.
I can read the driest, most textbook-y description of a PCT scenario, and I’ll be dabbing my eyes with a tissue.
I can watch a car commercial with a dash of PCT and straight up happy-cry. And if they really slather it on, it’s more like happy sobbing.
This archetype is so readily accessible to me that I have to choose when to engage it, or I’ll end up weeping in grocery store aisles. Really, weeping is shorthand for a whole constellation of sensations: my heart swells with warmth and compassion, and my body hums with love, generosity, and a sense of this is what it means to be human.
Not all forms of togetherness hit me the same way, though.
To understand why, we need to time travel back to my childhood, where PCT energy came with a catch. In my family, connection was available, but only if you were willing to pay the price. You could belong if you denied large swathes of yourself and merged with the blob. It wasn’t togetherness so much as absorption.
You could be part of the group, but only if you sacrificed your selfhood.
It took me decades to realize how profoundly lonely this form of “connection” was. Being together meant disappearing. It meant divorcing myself from my inner world, because that world contained messy things that could disrupt the blob. There was no room for meaningful difference.
💡 Which is why, for me, the most potent charge of PCT isn’t just unity. It’s unity through difference.
Each person brings their own shape, their own strangeness, their own way of being, and the collective becomes stronger because of it, not in spite of it.
When I obey my old programming—difference is dangerous—I feel chronically unsafe, cynical, and angry at the world. (And if you want to see this fear writ large, turn on the news.)
But when I look for ways to honor differences while still working together, something shifts. Sometimes only for a minute or two, but that’s often enough. After all, miracles aren’t bound by ordinary space and time.
When I live from this place, the world hums with connection. When I cast spells from this place, they work. And when I write from this place, the words feel alive.
This is what matters to me when I’m writing, and it’s why group dynamics keep showing up in my stories. By learning how groups form, strain, fracture, and learn to function together—and how to translate this onto the page—I’m becoming a more competent channel for this personally meaningful archetype.
This imbues my writing with a greater sense of purpose and meaning, which is wonderful in and of itself, and it’s also handy on days when I can find a million excuses not to sit my butt in the chair.
When we identify the archetypes that matter to us personally, we gain clarity.
We stop fearfully copying other people’s formulas in hopes of “getting it right,” and start channeling something that already has energy, coherence, and life. This opens up avenues of research, skills-building, and story that you’re uniquely motivated to explore. These threads seem to glow, to beckon you onward, and no two people will be drawn to the exact same ones.
When you follow these threads, your writing glimmers with a magic only you can bring into the world, and I don’t know about you, but those are the kinds of books I want to read!
Next time, I want to stay with this idea and show how I translated this meaningful archetype into concrete choices on the page so you can do the same in your work.
See you then.