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!