A Kingdom Built on the Sea: My Grandfather’s Legacy
To understand the scale of the story I was born into, one has to look at the remarkable arc of my French grandfather’s life. He began in what he describes in his memoir as abject poverty, in a far-off and oft-forgotten corner of France where electricity, paved roads, and running water were fantasies as unattainable as the moon. During the German occupation of 1940-1945, his world was one of rationing and deep humiliation, yet he nurtured what he called a “secret garden,” which he describes as his inner spirit that allowed him to see beyond the yoke of wartime precariousness.
Driven by a traumatic past, he spent the middle of the twentieth century hurtling toward a greater destiny, eventually rising to become a global captain of industry and one of the wealthiest men in France. He built a commercial fishing empire with a fleet of ships that spanned from West Africa to Peru to France, ostensibly to ensure his children and grandchildren would never know the famine-prone hardships of his youth. But as he forged his kingdom, he unwittingly created a Ring of Power.
The drive that saved him in the 1940s became, decades later, a rigid system that valued preserving his institutions over the humanity of the individuals within it. By the time his businesses filed for bankruptcy in 2014, the legacy was no longer a gift; it was a weight that had torn the family apart over thirty years of mismanagement, corruption, and strife.
The Ring of Power and the Archetypal Mirror
For a long time, I viewed this collapse through a purely intellectual lens. There was the explicit favoritism shown to my uncle, the third child; the systematic scapegoating of my father, who was the oldest and most competent son; and my aunt being consistently discounted and silenced by a system that had no room for the feminine voice. I saw all of these as a unique brand of familial dysfunction. It was so bad that the company CFO called our family “le monde de l’irréel” or La-La Land.
I had the benefit of being somewhat of an outsider to all of this. My American mother moved us back to the United States when I was twelve, explicitly to distance us from the family’s insanity. The summers I spent in France, however, I was one of them, but also not, and I believe my ‘American-ness’ gave me an outside perspective on what was happening that no one else in the family could see. I watched the saga unfold, summer by summer, and it made for incredible stories to take home to my friends in the U.S.
Later in life, while exploring the broad and complex world of Jungian psychology, I discovered Jean Shinoda Bolen’s work, and the recognition hit me like a purse full of bricks. Bolen’s analysis of mythic story constructs revealed that my family wasn’t special after all. We were simply living out fundamental human patterns that had been codified in myths for thousands of years, specifically in Wagner’s Ring Cycles. My grandfather was a textbook Wotan, the Authoritarian Father who sacrifices his inner vision and the heart of his family to maintain the contracts and power of the world he built. My father was the hero-son who had to be cast out because his competence threatened the father’s absolute authority, while my uncle, the Golden Child, was favored not for his ability, but for his willingness to stay within the Father’s orbit.
Connecting lived experience to archetypal storytelling
Connecting these lived experiences to archetypal storytelling changed everything for me. It provided the connective tissue between the fragmented anecdotes of my grandfather’s memoir and the emotional reality of my childhood. Once I could see the story skeleton beneath the skin of our family drama, I stopped being a character in the tragedy and became the author of my narrative.
This is the payoff of archetypal awareness: it grants you profound empathy. I no longer had to resent my grandfather for his choices or my family for their roles. I realized they were caught in an archetypal trap, playing out a script that was written into their subconscious long before they were born. As a writer, this made me more observant and less judgmental. It allowed me to see the 2014 bankruptcy not as a shameful failure, but as a necessary Götterdämmerung—a “Twilight of the Gods” that had to happen so the Ring could be returned to the nature from which it was stolen. The closure was a relief because it meant the curse was broken.
It was a realization that was the missing link in the development of my fiction writing, specifically within the world of my Saga of Hasting the Avenger. Before I understood the significance of these patterns and where they belonged in my personal world, I was building characters from the outside in, but the archetypal lens allowed me to construct interpersonal relationships that feel emotionally lived-in rather than intellectually designed. By recognizing the Wotan in my grandfather or the scapegoat in my father, and the movements of the Hero’s Journey, the Star-Crossed Lovers, the Coming of Age, among others, I could imbue Hasting’s world with the same high-stakes tension that defined my family’s commercial empire, plagued by mismanagement and corruption, and my life outside of it, too.
Archetypal storytelling is the secret sauce of writing fiction: it is not a cold formula to be memorized and applied to a page like a math equation (like plot types with specific beats). Instead, the power lies in applying the structure to our own lives first. When we recognize that we are already breathing and moving within these ancient narratives, we stop writing from the mind and start writing from the heart. That is how a fictional world achieves emotional realism. It is only when a writer has processed their own history as an archetypal journey, one reflected in world mythologies, that they can connect with the hearts of their readers, offering them a mirror for their own “secret gardens” and universal struggles.
Archetypal Storytelling is About Transformation and Growth
Archetypal storytelling is the fundamental mechanism of character transformation. Humans respond to stories because they are the ancient vessels we use to transfer wisdom about how to live and face challenges across generations. To keep a reader’s attention, a character must undergo a metamorphosis that mirrors the process of individuation, integrating the conscious and unconscious mind to become a whole person.
Whether a character is “Overcoming the Monster” by facing deep-seated fears or undergoing a “Rebirth” to escape the dark shadow of addiction, these structures work because they reflect our instinctive inner conditions. In my own work, I have found that the most effective way to drive this change is to follow the narrative sequences inherent in world mythology (à la C.G. Jung and Joseph Campbell). In the Saga of Hasting the Avenger, I deliberately used these archetypal backbones to structure Hasting’s evolution. Book one serves as a “Hero’s Journey” through the dual lenses of “Coming of Age” and “Star-Crossed Lovers.” Book two follows a “Descent into the Underworld,” forcing the character to face his shadow self before he can be reborn. By book three, the narrative shifts into a “Rags to Riches” archetype, where his true potential is finally recognized by the world.
Join the Journey: From Anecdote to Archetype
I now teach these very concepts in my medieval writing workshop for Medievalists.net, where I help writers move past intellectual plotting and into emotional storytelling. In our sessions, I guide students through an exercise in which they reflect on a personal challenge from their lived experience and identify the subconscious archetypal structure they followed to achieve change. We then use that “story skeleton” to rewrite their fictional narratives from the heart. Watching students experience those “ah-ha” moments as they realize they are already living out these movements is the most rewarding part of my craft.
If you are ready to stop writing from the mind and start connecting with the hearts of your readers, I invite you to join us. There is currently a waitlist for the next workshop session, where we will dive deep into the power of lived experience and the secret sauce of archetypal storytelling. Sign up today to secure your spot and begin your own creative transformation.