Hi gang. Craig with you again. Earlier this year, I wrote a series here about The Hero’s Journey. This is a link to PART ONE.

Then I went on to write several Expansion Packs. Those are easy enough to find by using the search function at the very bottom of our page. I’m not giving you a link, because they cover a broad spectrum of topics related to story structure.

Today, I want to talk about stock characters. Call them tropes, call them central casting, whatever you like.

Order the grab bag

Look at those envelopes. There are a million of them, like Nutty Professor, Bully, Alpha Jock, you get the idea. One of my points is the envelopes are kind of flat, and so are these characters.

This is because we’ve seen them a million times. Stock characters are like tropes because they got there on a path…