Frauds & Myths & Advice

 For writers & other creative types only.

I’m A Fraud. Please Don’t Tell Anybody! by Michael Barrington (Lit Mag News) offers this thought for you:

Charles Dickens sits at the head of a long oak table, peering over his spectacles. Jane Austen raises an eyebrow. George Orwell taps a pen thoughtfully. Margaret Atwood in her low, ironic, monotone, tells me to sit. My application lies before them, thin and unconvincing. I mumble almost incoherently about my professional identity issues.

“Has he suffered enough?” Dickens asks the panel as though it was a prerequisite. No answer.

“Has he observed society with sufficient wit?” Austen enquires demurely. No answer.

“Has he told the truth?” grunts George Orwell almost absentmindedly while scrutinizing the Burmese tattoos on his knuckles. No answer.

I am jittery, a bundle of nerves, and attempt a response, apologizing for the quality of my work.

“Nobody is making you write. So don’t whine,” Atwood says, looking me straight in the eye, her soft Canadian accent cutting through the tension in the room. “And oh, by the way, you might write from the heart, but you’d better polish with your brain.”

At which point I am advised to try again in a few decades and summarily dismissed.

 ***

And perhaps that is where the unease originates. The expectation that writing should feel certain, when in fact it rarely does. When writing is not mastery, but a disciplined form of uncertainty. And the more I read about writers, the more I suspect that feeling like a fraud is not a disqualifying condition—it may, in fact, be a prerequisite. A sort of secret handshake. Perhaps if you’re certain of your brilliance, you may have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Personally, Kurt Vonegut’s words playing in my head like a mantra, keep me grounded: “When I write,” he says, “I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”

***

And maybe I am a fraud. That thought doesn’t quite go away. But neither does this quiet pull back to the page, this small, persistent hope that if I keep showing up, something honest will eventually meet me there.

 Along with Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, I found Mario Vargas Llosa on YouTube. I read his book on writing while in prison and have read several of his novels (including Feast of the Goat). I found reading him more than worthwhile.

 

 

 How to Write Mythic Fiction: Stop Borrowing Old Myths and Start Creating New Ones (K.M. Weiland)

In many ways, mythic fiction is more popular than ever. Even as the Hero’s Journey has arguably lost some of the obsessive luster from decades past, storytellers and audiences alike are more entranced than ever by myth, fairy tale, cultural symbolism, and psychological archetypes. Yet in some ways, I feel like we’re also in a time in which we have somewhat lost touch with the underlying touchstones of why these forms are meaningful.

For the most part, we understand the idea of mythic fiction through a few specific lenses. On the one hand, we might think of the old stories—fairy and folk tales (e.g., Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard’s Wives, the Girl With No Hands, Vasilisa the Beautiful, etc.) or mythological stories that largely arose from interpretations of the supernatural (e.g., Kronos and the Titans; Isis, Osiris, and Horus; Eros, Psyche, and Aphrodite; Thor and Odin, etc.).

We also experience all these stories through the more anthropological perspective found in the works of Joseph Campbell, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, and others like them—who not only collected the old stories, but studied their underlying similarities, patterns, and symbolic messages.

From here, we might also think of the influence of archetypal psychological approaches, such as Carl Jung’s, in which the symbolism becomes increasingly internalized. These explorations are what gave birth to the fascination for modernizing such (arguably) ancient forms as the Hero’s Journey.

Increasingly, contemporary storytellers and audiences also understand myth and archetype specifically through popular culture’s reinterpreation of these myths and their underlying structures—most famously with Star Wars, but since then through an ever-increasing number of stories that seek to understand and tap the deep power and resonance of these old storyforms.

Not that I think it is possible to write an epic about Indiana, albeit Raintree County made a damn good stab at the epic. I do not have the time left me to write a book like that, even if I had the talent.

 Here are four reasons I think the writing of mythic fiction is particularly important right now:

1. Our Relationship to the Old Stories Has Grown Thin

2. Mythic Fiction Requires the Partnership of Intuition and Intellect 

3. Mythic Fiction Reconnects Writers to the Deep Source of Story

4. The Need for New Myths in a Changing World 

And my critique of my writing:

Reading We Could’ve Been Happy Here made me think that I did not do enough with personal relationships in my stories. Not all, maybe not even in the best of them. But that was not the idea. What I wanted to do the personal and what I will call the economic. Probably read too much Dreiser. Who is a chore to read. He is not sentimental in a sickly way. Mostly, this email goes back to what we have been talking about all along - that what we grew up with is no longer fashionable. We might be the tail end of the Industrial Age. We have not retreated from the world into emotional navel-gazing. Perhaps I could turn up the emotional stakes, but I can neither see how nor do I want to revise further. The novella might actually do better at the emotional stakes in the Daria stories and in the Kate Harvey parts. The Mike Devlin divorce story was already emotional enough - even if it had to do with Mike trying to play hero. I was joking about camels, but there is little I see in some published stories that concern political/social issues. Also, not fashionable? Science fiction - some of it, anyway - does not shy away from these kinds of issues. I do think I did get how these people live and love in their environment. After all, we did. We were just trying to figure out how to have a life in a world of economic and social uncertainty, and we did not have the luxury of navel-gazing. A bit more thoughtfulness might have helped us, but there is the humanity, isn't it? 

 

sch 6/8