Mythology Is Important

One of the first things any aspiring writer hears is "READ!!"

Well, okay. Read what? Read crap, and learn from it? Read the bestseller list? What Oprah recommends?

I say read the classics. And start with the oldest you can find--Classical mythology, the Bible, all that good ancient stuff. Like it or not, that is the foundation of Western literature (sorry, Easterners...I don't know squat about your mythology). They are the source of much of the symbolism and allusion in novels even now, even thousands of years later. When you're solid on the ancient classics, move up, chronologically. Get to work on Shakespeare and Beowulf and then check out the Romantics and then onward.

Don't stop reading contemporary writing, of course. Just make sure you're getting a healthy dose of Old Stuff all the time. It will affect you subtly, believe me.

Now, you can dismiss this, probably, since it comes from the girl who writes fairy tales and myths. But because I've spent so much time studying mythology, I can see how deeply these archetypal tales pervade our modern storytelling. Yes, many of them come with a moral: the gods are ruthless manipulators and we are just their puppets, like the Iliad and the Odyssey tell us. But these moralistic stories are, as I said before, archetypes. They provide a framework upon which to build.

See, these myths and early dramas tell us something very basic about ourselves. Take Euripedes' Medea. Guy cheats on his wife, so she flips out and...kills everybody. Basically, it's an illustration of the quote, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." (Shakespeare stole this from William Congreve, by the way. And they stole it from Euripides.) Or take the story of Prometheus--guy steals fire from the gods and ends up getting his liver torn out every day, forever. What does that show us? We're curious creatures even when the consequences are potentially drastic.

These stories are often pretty basic in their original forms--we as the reader must supply some of the color for the ancient play or epic to read like a modern novel. The fact is, literature 2000 years ago wasn't as fully realized or studied as it is today, and literature now isn't as fully realized as it will be in 2000 years. Take ancient myths as what they are: foundations.

I think that's my attraction to retellings. I like to take ancient stories and read between the lines, find the parts of the stories that compel us to tell them over and over, for generations. And I like to enhance that. Sooner or later, I'll branch out into fully original stories, but my strong base in mythology will shape everything I write.

The mythology we study is centuries old, but for writers, it's as relevant now as it was when it was first being formed, thousands of years ago. So please. Respect your cultural ancestors and read. Their. Stories. All your fiction will be the stronger for it--whether it is traditional "speculative fiction" or not.