If I Had a Nickel
I wanted to write a story about a vampire guitarist. A friend scoffed: “If I had a nickel for every story about vampire guitarists…” Despite this quick dismissal of whatever need or passion was driving me to the sensuality of the vampire and the sensuality of music, I had to examine the idea that the story has already been written. I had to ask, What are recurring myths, and why do we read them?
Authors often hear that every story has already been written: the same love stories told again and again, the epic heroes on their quests, the rags to riches fantasies, the tragic hero’s fall. Joseph Campbell’s idea of the monomyth, for example, describes the basic patterns of the hero’s journey as it appears time and again in books and in movies.
Do Stories Have to Be New?
So what’s the point of writing if an author’s allowed only to write something never done before, and yet everything has been done before? How do we define new? A werewolf guitarist? A vampire drummer? I’m deliberately trivializing because I can’t imagine dismissing anyone’s story idea without knowing what compels the writer to write it and how the writing of it might bring something new to life—or something old to life again.
Many writers, at some time or another, strive to retell myths and fairy tales and legends. Maybe they want to extend characters and story lines from the ancient myths or even from their favorite TV series. It isn’t only authors. Think about novels you’ve loved, paintings that have provoked you, or songs that have stirred you. The evocation, the act of love for the story makes people want to extend the experience.
The Comfort of Myths
A good story lives beyond the final word. A good story transcends cultures and generations. However people have changed in society, something remains the same at the root. Myths and fairy tales are retold because, in them, people recognize the basic human traits that pervade culture and time. And in recognizing that, there is comfort.
What we are, we have already been. Names change. Quests change. Gender changes. Nationality changes. The journey to a foreign land becomes the journey into the psyche. The battle with the giants becomes the battle with oppressive bigotry.
Are we justified in our fear of great power if we witness that same fear and the struggle to overcome in the ancient myths, still being told? What in stories of gods coming down from heaven to mold our fates can be found in tales of youth fighting society’s expectations or the questing soul coming to peace with the path life has drawn? A fairy tale resonates in different ways for each person, each generation, each culture, depending on circumstances of place and time. A single story can be retold, reinterpreted, reimagined, relived a thousand times.
Gimmick or Truth?
While we fight for individuality, for the way to say something fresh, I want to be careful in defining what fresh means. If the goal is to say something new, the result often feels more like a gimmick, the work contrived and conniving. Maybe it’s not saying something new that matters but reliving what’s old and what resonates in that universal way—telling stories that makes us part of our history and our present and assures us a future as human beings.
Stories don’t die unless we forget them.
What if we do forget the old myths and fairy tales? What will that make us?
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“Eight writers modernize ancient mythologies in Distorted, proving that not every story has been told” (or at least not told in quite this way). Available from Transmundane Press. “Tantalizingly bloody tales featuring human pitted against beast and gods, with the true majesty and horrors of the afterlife, with love and death and desire…”
Blog writer Patricia J. Esposito is author of Beside the Darker Shore and has contributed to Distorted the short story “Where the Arrow Flies,” a retelling of the Apollo and Daphne myth, in which thwarted love seeks its failed cure.
