Beyond the Tropes: Screenwriting Experts John August and Craig Mazin Deconstruct Character Archetypes

LOS ANGELES — In the craft of screenwriting, character archetypes have served as foundational building blocks since the dawn of oral and written storytelling. Yet, as the medium evolved through the 20th century into the age of psychological taxonomies like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Enneagram, and the Big Five personality framework, writers have wrestled with a persistent challenge: how to utilize narrative shorthands without collapsing complex human psychology into predictable, one-dimensional tropes.

On a recent episode of the industry-leading podcast Scriptnotes, co-hosts John August and Craig Mazin tackled this ongoing creative dilemma. Delving into the functional mechanics of storytelling, the pair explored how writers can transcend basic narrative clichés. Their discussion was anchored by a practical, hands-on demonstration of the newly developed Character Creator Kit, a brainstorming tool designed to help writers construct multifaceted, psychologically rich characters.

Main Facts: Redefining Archetypes Through Narrative Function

The core debate centers on the distinction between a character’s personality and their functional role within a narrative structure. August and Mazin clarified that while personality models describe how real people behave, archetypes describe what characters do—their narrative utility.

Functional Utility: A character archetype like a "mentor" or a "spy" is not a personality type; it is a mechanism that drives the story forward in relation to other characters.
The Danger of Tropes: Reducing a character to a single archetype results in flat storytelling. Real human beings, and by extension compelling fictional characters, embody multiple, often contradictory, roles and traits.
The Character Creator Kit: Originating from a prototype built by former summer intern Sam Shapson, this newly released 110-card deck bypasses abstract psychological categorizations in favor of concrete narrative traits paired with light (virtue) and dark (shadow) attributes. Writers can shuffle, sort, and combine these cards to build characters with internal tension and systemic irony.

Chronology of Character Evolution: From Ancient Myths to Modern Toolkits

To understand how modern writers construct characters, August and Mazin mapped out the evolution of character design across literary history:

Ancient Mythology and Oral Tradition: Characters were distilled down to essential functions—the hero, the trickster, the mentor, the threshold guardian—to serve allegorical or moral plots.
The 20th-Century Psychological Turn: Writers began applying formal personality taxonomies (Myers-Briggs, Enneagram) to fictional subjects, attempting to treat imaginary figures with the statistical predictability of real humans.
The Intern’s Breakthrough (Summer 2025): Stark summer intern Sam Shapson cut slips of paper featuring distinct character archetypes and laid them out in constellations, discovering that characters function best as a collection of interacting traits rather than a single label.
Product Development and Kickstarter Launch (Late 2025): Challenged by August to refine the concept, Shapson developed a polished second prototype, resulting in the physical Character Creator Kit. The deck features color-coded cards spanning categories such as creativity, wisdom, love, authority, courage, passion, and menace.

Supporting Data: The Anatomy of the Character Creator Kit

The Character Creator Kit relies on a granular approach to character building, combining contrasting traits to generate dramatic tension. During the podcast demonstration, August and Mazin pulled cards at random to illustrate how combining seemingly disparate archetypes yields immediate narrative momentum:

The Guide + The Addict: A traditional mountain guide (who knows the path and helps travelers) is paired with the shadow side of an addict (consumed by craving, steering travelers astray). This inversion transforms a predictable trope into an unpredictable, high-stakes narrative figure—a Sherpa battling withdrawal halfway up a frozen peak.
The Mercenary + The Perfectionist: A hired gun with strict moral boundaries is fused with an obsessive need to polish every detail, creating a protagonist paralyzed or driven by impossible standards.
The Deity + The Networker: Merging supreme, law-transcending authority with omnipresent social connections ("friends in every room") yields a complex, cult-like antagonist who is both inspiring and terrifying.

By isolating the "light side" (what the character embraces) and the "shadow side" (what they hide or fear), writers can engineer internal irony—the engine of dramatic conflict.

Official Perspectives: The Philosophy of Character Construction

Both co-hosts emphasized that great characters are born from relational tension rather than isolated definitions.

"All characters are relational to other characters in the course of the story," John August noted during the episode. "You cannot be a mentor if there’s no one for you to be a mentor to. You have to have a student… or that could be an interesting character who is a studentless mentor, who has this drive to teach people but no one to teach."

Craig Mazin underscored the necessity of internal contradiction, pointing out that structural archetypes should never act as straitjackets.

"What I’m always looking for is just some sort of sense of an ironic conflict in somebody," Craig Mazin explained. "A guy who is an addict, he lives sober, he follows the plan. That’s a person. It’s also boring. There’s no dramatic value to that. Then, in a sick way, [the light side] wants you to fail. That’s very human. That’s interesting."

Mazin also reflected on how traditional archetypes can warp studio-driven sequels, noting how characters like Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid franchise lose their complex, multidimensional textures—such as coping with internment camps and personal grief—when reduced by later filmmakers to mere "mentor tropes."

Implications for the Screenwriting Community

The introduction of tactile brainstorming tools like the Character Creator Kit signals a broader shift in how writers approach pre-production. Rather than relying solely on rigid screenwriting formula books or digital screenwriting software, creators are increasingly turning to analog, modular methods to break through writer’s block and avoid derivative character writing.

By forcing writers to pair contradictory traits—such as pairing high authority with deep insecurity, or meticulous perfectionism with chaotic dependencies—the kit challenges creators to discover the "irony" within their characters before a single page of script is written. As Hollywood continues to demand fresh perspectives within familiar genre parameters, tools that dismantle tropes at the foundational level offer a vital bridge between commercial viability and psychological depth.