The "wise woman": cliché or not?

without knowing whether it's Adult, YA, etc. I can't say for sure if your protag really needs a mentor/'wise woman/character' to guide him. but i think no matter what the genre, one mentor should be plenty. if it started raining mentors, that would definitely be a problem, imo... after all, how many mentors can one encounter in one lifetime.

if you must have a mentor, consider making her flawed in some way for added conflict and reading interest. characters, like people, must have flaws to be believable, otherwise they may come off as cartoon cutouts... just my 2 pence.

good luck with this. and yeah, revise and edit, it usually helps you see the weaknesses.

I see such things as the "Wise Woman" as archetypes, not cliches. An archetype is a recurring image/symbol, which in a way could be seen as a cliche. But something only becomes cliche when it becomes very watered down and trite to the point of being laughable. Archetypes keep recurring because they hold such power over our imaginations. A cliche is an archetype that has lost its meaning.

You can keep your wise women without making them cliches, but that means you'll have to put hard work into them to make them not laughable, not trite, not overdone. How to do this? I'm afraid I can't really say. It depends on so many things. All you can really do is write your characters with such a passion that they come across as three dimensional, real beings, and not as cardboard stock characters that make people roll their eyes and say, "I've seen this before!"

I think that's the key--archetypes work and don't become cliches because the writer cares about them so much they "come to life."

But like I said, it takes a lot of work.

One way to start is by putting a new spin on something that's been done before.

Tehuti88 is right about the archetypes, but personally, the "old wise woman" is right up there with the wizard and the mysterious old man who's more than he lets on. I do find them a bit overdone, and they tend to stick out as the author being unable to figure out how to have the character learn what they need to learn for the book to work. A bit too deux es machina for me.

That said, there's are ways to do everything so they work, even the most overused or cliche. If your instintcs are telling you it's an iffy choice, trust them and look at other ways to do what you need. If you feel this is the right choice, but are worried about how it might appear, then trust yourself and write what you feel is the correct way to do it. It's all in HOW you do it, not what.

It depends completely on how you do it. If you make an interesting character and it enhances your plot, why not?

I don't know if this is the same thing you mean, Julia, but I have a 'wise woman' in my historical (an invented character). However, I've made her young and sexy, charismatic (I hope) and a tiny bit dark. She carries out very ancient rites and receives omens, that sort of thing. Where I've tried to make her different is by creating a strong love bond between my MC and this woman, but also conflict because the MC refuses to accept the woman's wisdom and fights against it.

Clio said:

I don't know if this is the same thing you mean, Julia, but I have a 'wise woman' in my historical (an invented character). However, I've made her young and sexy, charismatic (I hope) and a tiny bit dark. She carries out very ancient rites and receives omens, that sort of thing. Where I've tried to make her different is by creating a strong love bond between my MC and this woman, but also conflict because the MC refuses to accept the woman's wisdom and fights against it.

Click to expand...

I think that's the key-- to make your wise woman different and unique in some way. In the movie Cold Mountain, there is an old, wise woman who herds goats. She is an archetype in many ways, but because she is so unique, it takes a long time to notice it.

Or, you could just go through and make some of your wise women male, or young, or aliens, or vampires, or all the above.

Julia said:

Working towards the end of my first draft of a novel, I realize my story shares many elements with what you could call "visionary" or "spiritual" fiction. I discuss many spiritual and existential themes although not in a certain model such as "the seven principles of this" or the "the three steps to there". At the beginning, I set out to write something more mainstream but I now realize it might not turn out that way, thus skewing my chances of being published and getting known by a general readership.

There is also a certain concern that I might sound cliché. I end up producing quite a few "wise woman" characters (something I'll obviously attend to during revision). They end up being either old, holding a "wise book" or guiding my protagonist through the loops. I can't eliminate all the wise ones but I don't want them to sound like another rehash of various mouthpieces for new age principles everybody has already heard before.

I can't fight who I am and the ideals and visions I have. Yet, I am concerned about the reputation inspirational fiction has which is not always the best one. I'm trying to get rid of what is not original and keep a balance between what I really want to write and keeping myself from writing "another new age novel with unoriginal elements that we don't want to read". You see what I mean?

Click to expand...

I'm generally not a fan of the wise woman cliche, but I have nothing against intelligent old ladies on principle--they just have a habit of all being the same. They also tend to dislike men, which I find annoying.

I'd play around with them a little, giving them unique personality quirks and such. Like a hatred of kittens. I've never seen a wise woman who hated kittens. Or children. Either one would be awesome to me .

I think if you just try writing them as individual characters with personalities of their own, as opposed to cliches/archetypes/"wise old ones," then they stand much less chance of coming across as cliches.

Almost everybody in real life can come across as a cliche if you try to sum up their entire personality in a few words. I'm the shy avoidant hermit shut-in. Am I a cliche? I hope not, because there's a LOT more to my personality aside from that.

The wise old people (misunderstood bad guys, good/bad twins, reluctant heroes, fill in the blank) in my writing are more than just wise old people. They're people, period. I can't think of a time when I sat down and thought, "Okay, now I need a wise mentor figure for this character." I just came up with an individual character, and if they happened to fit the archetype of mentor figure, well, then they did. But I didn't try to shoehorn them into that role; they just fit into it on their own.

This is right out of The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell.

You have wise women instead of a wise man, but the archtype is the same: an older teacher for the MC.

Best modern example: Star Wars (the 1977 movie). Lucas has the young hero setting out, meeting the wise person who teaches important stuff, the hero overcomes things, mystical forces are at work, etc.

If this is what you're drawn to writing, then you have to read Campbell! No need to re-invent the wheel from scratch--study how another wheel maker did it first!

There should be a copy at the library; it's a pretty famous book.

Now-- the wise person need not be NICE. That could be a twist on things.

In Frank Herbert's Dune the hero's first encounter with a "wise woman" was a scary, painful experience, and if he fails the test he dies. She wasn't kidding, either. At the end of the ordeal, when he doesn't succumb to fear she decides that he just "might" be a human.

In this case, the wise woman had her own agenda to accomplish. She wasn't the "sit around and help out kids who happen to drop in" type.

Ditto for Gandalf in LOTR. He'd look in on Frodo and Bilbo, but he was rather busy and always off doing things.

In Lois Bujold's Warrior's Apprentice the young hero takes along his wise man--a devoted but scarily psychotic bodyguard who isn't all that wise--and works to find his place in the galaxy. (You should read this book, too because Lois is an amazing writer, and I learned a LOT from her on the craft.)

And oh, check out this hard to find movie called "The Wizard of Oz". Young Dorothy gets help from a good witch to find her path home...

Perhaps to avoid a static character type your wise women can be out and moving, with barely any time to help your MC. This would prevent scenes from turning into a data dump.

I read a few pages from a self-pubbed new-age fantasy. The whole thing was one long data dump. The MC would ask a question, and the "wise woman" would spout off for pages with a really wise answer. The final statement usually ended with one of these: ! The writer just loved using !!!!!!!s throughout. Makes it hard to argue back.

It wasn't a story so much as a paste in of someone's FAQ page--and SHE made up all the questions.

One way to check your work is to use the "highlighter" tool in your WP program. If anything looks like a block of "teaching the youngling," highlight it in green. Action scenes can be red, world-building descriptives in yellow and so on.

Shrink your MS down to 10% and see what kind of color balance you have. Too much of any one color indicates areas in need of a fix.

Good luck!

Yup, it's an archetype (wise men, wise women, mentor) -- a bit overdone but that's why they're archetypes. One thing to do is to make them more three-dimensional. Obi-wan Kenobi had a life; he wasn't just there to serve Luke as a mentor. The fact is, wise old men and women are everywhere in our real world, so it's really not much of a cliche but a reality. How you make that work without sounding stale is entirely up to you.

Ray's right--it IS an archetype, but it's a necessary one.

Humans are always taught by those older and wiser--unless you're writing about a character who learns by osmosis like Edgar Cayce did as a child. Parents are mentors, teacher are mentors, you can even extend it so that a columnist, an author, a TV pundit serve as mentors for people. The wise old woman was the natural receptacle for folklore and/or healing knowledge until just within the last couple of centuries.

My advice is to stop worrying about an archetypal character being cliche and start worrying about making the character live and breathe and think and walk off the pages. No one will have time to get concerned about the archetype if the character lives for them.

All novels incorporate tons of cliches. Cliche's are shorthand and easily understood personifications or symbols. The job of the writer is to make the cliche's look less obvious.

Mentors are real things. I don't see why one could not be an old woman, after all, if something takes many years to learn then you would not be looking at a teacher who is six years old. A wise child is often a bit supernatural, although kids can be smart & insightful they still do not have the experience and judgment.

I woldnt fear it because you are working in a genre which uses those conventions-- wizards, dragons, unicorns witches, vampires, wear-critters are all cliches. So are teachers, cops, senators, mothers, robbers, private eyes, explorers, doctors...

If you pay more attention to the differences than the similarities it often works out.