Transformation - a new story archetype?

This site and Transformative Narrative Project are all about change, of course! So where does this fit into the story archetypes that Booker talked about.

1. Tragedy - the hero with a fatal flaw has a tragic ending
2. Comedy - a happy and/or romantic ending
3. Overcoming the monster - the good guy (or, as in the case of Lara Croft, girl) wins the day
4. Voyage and return - the protagonist sets out on a journey and faces many demons, leading to personal development, then returns and talks about it
5. Quest - the hero sets out to find an object or person of importance
6. Rags to riches (or riches to rags to riches)
7. Rebirth - the hero loses something important, and along with this the reason for living, then finds a new reason to live and is 'reborn'

In my last blog post I made the distinction between pure comedy and romance, creating an 8th category.

Also in the last post I asked people to reflect on what kind of story would inform their own narrative in an applied story sense. If you have tried this out, using a pivotal moment in your life, maybe you will have decided that none of these categories is sufficiently adequate on its own. As they say, truth is stranger than fiction - and real life stories are complex and often difficult to unravel. There is an art involved, and if the story is being told by someone other than the 'main protagonist', there is a great responsibility to honour that person's truth (which may also shift and change in the course of the relating and retelling).

I am making a bold assumption that Booker's story archetypes are of little use to the Transformative Narrative Project, except to highlight the differences between the traditional storytelling theory and methodology and those of applied storytelling.

For this we need a whole new category: transformation - my working definition of this being 'a story that follows a process of change that has an important impact on the hero's (or heroine's) life'. The story contains a journey, or a part of a journey, that the particular person sees as pivotal in their life, and which has changed/transformed them in some way. There could be romance or comedy, even tragedy involved, but the real life protagonist in transformational story telling actually goes through a fundamental change in the way he or she feels, believes, and behaves.

Which life events can be seen as transformative? The list is endless, of course. Obviously it is not the event itself that is important, but the impact it has on us. For some of us, a simple word or two by a trusted mentor is enough to change the course of our lives, for others, winning gold in a sports event may be meaningless. It all depends on our own raison d'etre, our personal goals, motivations, values. In this way, we can see that applied storytelling is a very democratic process - everyone has at least one story to tell.