Modern Myth
I want to share with you the thoughts of two people who have greatly
influenced not only my thinking on this topic of content and storytelling, but also my own creative body of work.
One can't help but listen to their words and say, "Aha, they're right. Of course, it's so simple. This is
what the new stories should be about."
Let's start with Joseph Campbell during his interviews with Bill Moyers,
as he speaks about myth and meaning, essentially defining what I believe to be a new genre of fiction, fulfilling
the literary and sociological requirements for what a modern myth must include in order to be meaningful, valuable,
and appropriate for the society for which it is created.
"The only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future
is one that is talking about the planet--not the city, not these people, but the planet and everybody on it."
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Campbell goes on to explain the elements that these "new" myths must contain...
[They] will have to deal with exactly what all myths have dealt with--the maturation
of the individual, from dependency through adulthood, through maturity, and then to the exit; and then how to relate
this society to the whole of nature and the cosmos. That's what the myths have all talked about, and what this
one's got to talk about. But the society that it's got to talk about is the society of the planet.
Following this line of thinking in my own work, particularly Atlantis,
I have tried to take the great thinking and teachings of the world throughout history and condense them, collate
them, reform them, and creating a fictional framework around which to present these profound moral Truths.
It's relatively easy to do, and the process lends itself as easily to
non-fiction as fiction, as easily to young audiences as to mature ones. Listen to what Mihaly Csikzenmihalyi, author
of Flow, Creativity, and the Evolving Self, has to say about content and storytelling...
"We need to reinvent the stories that give meaning to our lives, or, at least,
reinvent ways of telling them."
Atlantis is the first of my offerings to address this need.
Continue to "Atlantis as Myth"
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