Tap into the Mythical
When you’re a writer, you’re taking part in a trade that goes back a long way. Further back, in fact, than actual writing; you’re tapping into the need for human beings to decode, denote and propagate their experiences. That’s pretty deep for a Saturday afternoon.
I’ll get to the topic at hand. This article will quickly talk about mythical writing for fictional works and mythical writing for non-fictional works.
Tap into the Mythical: Fiction Writing
A lot of writers have written about this already, and done so better than I can. Joseph Campbell coined “The Mythic Journey” which decodes the whole process of creating a story with a mythological arc. Essentially, mythical writing in fiction revolves around archetypal characters and storylines, whether that’s Jesus – God himself – sacrificing himself for the good of all mankind, or the latest nerd-in-teen-comedy who works up the courage to talk to a girl.
Of course, there’s more than one mythological arc, so you’re not going to wear out the formula any time soon. If you’re an analytical type, you can buy a big book of mythology and write out the characters and draws of each story. If you’re a non-analytical type, then you can just make sure every story you write has a character facing a colossal challenge at the same time as overcoming his/her own personal character flaws. If the two are related, great, but they don’t have to be.
Another aspect to mythical story-telling that nobody seems to mention anymore is the need for a moral message. (It’s possibly because we live in a scarily amoral age, but that’s none of my business.) great mythology – whether it’s The Iliad or Lord Of The Rings – has embedded moral messages. Sometimes, like in Norse mythology, that moral is “bad stuff’s going to happen anyway.” The actual message doesn’t matter. It has to be there.
If it doesn’t, the reader will get confused and bored. There’s one current fantasy series-turned smash-hit TV show that’s about to enter its sixth season which comes to mind as having a complete lack of moral message, and the major criticism of said series is that it’s impossible to tell where it’s going. Time will tell as to whether the message appears from nowhere somewhere around the last season.
Tap into the Mythical: Non-Fiction Writing
Mythology and fiction writing obviously go hand-in-hand. But what about non-fiction writing? I’d argue that it’s exactly the same. I’ve written before about how fiction and non-fiction writing are basically the same endeavour, and the same is true for the mythological aspect of writing.
I could explain this with some straight-controversy: All non-fiction writing is fictional anyway. This article is my opinion, which let’s face it, is only loosely correlated with objective reality. As is the topic I’m discussing. Biographies of your favourite film star? Forget it. Having been a ghost writer, there’s a liberal sprinkling of truth in every biography, the rest is just heroic structure.
For instance, I know a few musicians. One of them is involved in an anti-bullying awareness-building thing. They talk to kids about how they were bullied at school. This person was never bullied. However, it fits into the “overcoming adversity” archetype that pretty-much no celebrity has actual experience with but every consumer wants to see.
Even Wikipedia articles on fungi are fought over when the narrative doesn’t fit with orthodox thinking: make no mistake, non-fiction is mostly fictional.
The more practical-minded of you are wondering when I’ll get to the “What do you actually do with this information?” question. The answer is now.
To add mythological elements into your non-fiction writing, think about your target market. Turn their challenges, virtues and life stories into something mythical. If there’s one thing better than reading a myth, it’s being the myth yourself. That’s how most people feel. In practice it looks like these examples:
- Aspirin adverts on television, which accompany “Ever had a headache?” with a picture of a 2D skull with literal flames bursting out of it or something. This is mythologizing a common ailment with unsurmountable challenge.
- The pop-up advert that starts with, “I used to be an unemployed single mother, but now I make $5 million an hour online. Zero-to-Hero story.
- The news article which talks about how villainous a really evil-villain who got caught stealing someone’s underwear off their clothesline is. Whilst I’m sure said thief has issues, he’s hardly Moriarty.
- “One Secret Can Change Your Life” is essentially a variation on the age-old theme of buried treasure. Hardcoded into our biology are various ideas of social structure and buried treasure used to be the only way you’d ever rise to a different station. Now we have an economically-liberated society, that buried gold is now secrets for getting laid on Tinder or whatever.
You get the picture.
Final Thoughts
Mythology is a part of human culture. It’s probably a part of our DNA as well, (though that’s completely unfounded amateur speculation.) If you want to appeal to human beings with your writing, then you’ll probably want to tap into mythological writing techniques to write whatever it is you’re working on.
You don’t have to write the next Lord of the Rings to do this, nor do you have to turn every sales letter you write into one of those god-awful 20,000 word eternal-scrolling pages that focus on every little detail of failure in the writer’s life and how their product helped them overcome it. Instead, you just need to let your inner story-teller out. We’re designed for mythology, after all.