Welcome, luminous writers. This is Week 3 in our 12-session guided journey through archetypes—a series designed to help you explore recurring narrative patterns, surface resonant themes in your own work, and write deeply from lived experience and imagination.
We’ve already met the Caregiver, who offers support and sustains others, and the Rebel, who challenges and disrupts. Now, the Innocent arrives with a different kind of power—not through protection or defiance, but through presence. If the Caregiver tends to others and the Rebel pushes against constraint, the Innocent reminds us to stay open, to ask why things are the way they are, and to hold onto clarity even in complexity.
Today’s focus: The Innocent—the one who holds wonder and naïveté.
Total Session Time: 30 minutes
Guidelines to Get Started
First, gather your writing tools and remember: your creative energy leads. If you find yourself in a deep flow, follow it. Pause the recording, skip prompts, or veer off track—this series is yours to shape, like children building sandcastles, creating something beautiful in the moment.
Second, know that innocence is never neutral—it’s filtered through race, gender, class, sexuality, age, and ability. As you write, consider: who gets to be seen as innocent in your world, and who is denied that grace before they even speak?
Exploring innocence may bring up complex feelings about your own relationship to knowledge, protection, and the ways you’ve been seen or misunderstood. Be gentle with yourself. Have water nearby. Stretch or pause as needed. Write only what feels right today—there’s no “should.”
Introducing the Innocent
The Innocent finds wonder in forgotten corners: the shift of light, a laugh on the wind. Their endless questions cut through pretense like a cool stream through dry land, and their belief in possibility unsettles the comfortably certain. They meet the world with wonder unspent.
As a writer, you might be turned off by innocent characters. But don’t write them off as weak or naive; innocence, like morning light, reveals with an unsettling clarity. Their hope is persistent. Their questions, essential.
And you may already have the Innocent in your writing: an adult still expecting fairness, a child naming truths others ignore, or an elder who refuses bitterness.
The Innocent shows up differently depending on the form you’re working in. In poetry, their voice might surface through luminous imagery, unfiltered questions, or a speaker who notices what others overlook. In fiction, they may be a character whose clarity disrupts the story’s emotional logic or moral complacency. In memoir, the Innocent often appears in remembered versions of the self—childhood scenes, early awakenings, or moments when clarity pierced through confusion. However they emerge, Innocents tend to reveal what others have agreed not to see.
If you’re ready to write some wonder and clarity, let’s begin.
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