Mythic Writers Blog

First, I wanted to mention that my blog correspondent gig with Eric Maisel kicked off this week. To see my first post for Muse Quest PDX, and all the others great posts from correspondents, (there’s an excellent one from yesterday called “The Forbidden Myth”), go to Creativity Central.

Now, on to today’s blogging. Today’s post is maybe a little more about writing than about myths, but it does tie in, so I’m putting it here.

I’m currently thinking about how close a story has to stay to the original myth that inspired it. Does it have to have all of the parts of the original story? For example, does a Cinderella based story always have to have a wicked stepmother and two ugly stepsisters? Does there always have to be a prince? Or could she possibly rescue herself in the end? I think that a story can still be mythic and still be considered a story about X myth (a Cinderella story, a Snow White story, etc.) even if some of the original story points are changed or left out.

As an example, let’s look at the gwargedd annwn story I’m toying with. In the original, the humans were always welcome in the realm of the water faeries, welcome to dance and eat and enjoy the lovely lands, as long as they didn’t take anything back with them. Then, a human took a flower back to the human lands, and the door to the faerie realm was closed to them forever. Great. It’s a good story, interesting. But what if I want modern humans to go to the realm of the water faeries? If the door is really closed forever, my story can never happen. So I need a loophole. But there isn’t a loophole in the original story. So I have to create one. I have to invent a way to get my characters into the realm of the water faeries even though the myth inspiring my story says the way is closed forever.

I think quite a lot of mythic fiction that deals with specific myths and faerie tales is probably born this way. “What if, instead of that happening in the story, this other thing happens instead?” And a new story, inspired by the old, is born.

I don’t think the inspiration for mythic stories that don’t follow specific myths is quite as easy to pin down. For that matter, I think my musings about myths as inspiration here is probably overly simplistic in regards to some mythic tales. But this is the way the inspiration for my water faerie story was born, and it seems like it’s probably the way a lot of myth-inspired stories are born, so I wanted to mention it. Maybe thinking about it will inspire someone else to look at a favorite fairy tale and create a new story. And then I’ll have more fun things to read!

Going off on a tangent from something I wrote about in a post in my writing blog, I’ve been thinking about the differences between myths and mythic fiction.

I think one of the biggest differences is in the characters, in how they are portrayed. In myths and fairy tales, characters seem rather simplistic. We don’t get a lot of the whys behind their actions. We know that Jack decided to sell the cow for magic beans. We know that the stepmother in “Hansel and Gretel” thinks that “bairns are a burden” and wants to get rid of the children. But we have no idea what has brought these characters to these decisions.

In mythic fiction, on the other hand, as in any good story, we see characters with deeper motivations and full inner lives. We get to not only follow them through the world on their adventures, we get to see how they are feeling, what they are thinking, why they are doing what they do.

I want to do a bit of research to back up my idea. Right off the top of my head I can’t think of any fairy tales and myths that give us a lot of insight into the characters’ motivation, but I want to look around to make sure I’m right.

If you can think of any myth or fairy tale where there’s some real character development, inner conflict, etc., please leave a comment so I can start compiling a list. I may decide to take this topic further depending on what I turn up. For now, though, this is it.

I am cross posting this from my writing blog.  I am getting ready to go away for the weekend tomorrow, and time has just gotten away from me.  I was intending to write a post about ghosts in the machine, but it isn’t finished.  Still, you’ll have something to look forward to next week now.  And those of you who don’t read both of my blogs will get to hear about a magnificent story you really should read.  With apologies for the redundancy…

Last week, my copy of Charles de Lint’s latest chapbook, “Yellow Dog,” arrived. Glorious! I did something I almost never do—I sat down on the couch as soon as I was in the door and had fed the cat, and I read the whole thing. No dinner preparations, no checking e-mail, nothing until the story was finished. When I was done, I almost didn’t need dinner, I was that satisfied.

This is one of CdL’s desert stories. They are just as powerful and entrancing and moving as his stories of greener places, and whenever I read one, I find myself wanting to visit the desert. Arizona. New Mexico. Dry, bright, harsh places, beautiful in an entirely different way from the mountains and trees here in Portland or the lakeside woods and fields back home in Chicago. I read these desert stories, the stories of canyons and cliffs and hawks and coyotes, and I can almost smell it. I can nearly feel the sand gritting underfoot, see the endless blue sky, smell the baked earth. And I want to go.

Even more importantly I think, at least in the grand scheme of my life, is that I want to write like that. I not only want people to be able to see and smell and feel my settings, I want them to long for those places the way you long for home when you’ve been gone too long.

That’s the best storytelling to me. The kind that leaves you satisfied, filled with words and images, and yet still longing for more. The kind that is so beautiful it leaves an ache inside you that is half joy and half hunger for something you can’t name.

I don’t know if I will reach that pinnacle. I do know that I’ll try. And I do know that I’m lucky that I at least know what it is I’m aiming for.Y