Mythology and folklore can be an excellent source of storytelling inspiration. In the past, it could be tricky to track down info on myths outside what I’ll call the Big 4 (Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Norse). Even for these well-known pantheons, a lot of the available info was over-simplified, or filtered through the view of writers who misconstrued (or sometimes straight-up rewrote) the original story.
Today, scholars, folklorists, and mythologists from around the world can share their knowledge without going through an academic gatekeeper. The result is a wealth of information about mythologies, pantheons, rituals, and folk tales, both ancient and active. While the internet is still shockingly incomplete in some areas, there are tons of resources available for writers seeking inspiration from myths and folk stories. Here are some of the sites I’ve found most useful for my own research.
In the simplest terms, point of view can be defined as the perspective through which a story is being told. A story’s POV identifies three things:
Who is telling the story
The relationship between the narrator and main character
The distance between the characters and readers
Those things are all critical to how a story comes across to the reader, and shifting the POV—even if it’s just from one 3rd-person close narrator to a different one—can have a huge impact on how the reader interprets the story (and how much they enjoy reading it).
I love a good writing prompt. Or even a not so good writing prompt. Honestly, anything that gets my creative mind going and takes it into a new place is a winner in my book. And starting from something that’s inherently entertaining, like a board game, can be especially valuable, in my opinion. It shifts your mind out of work-brain and into fun-brain, taking away some of the pressure of producing words and helping to silent the inner critic so you can just enjoy the process.
Because that’s what writing should be, even if you’re writing about a serious topic, even if you’re a capital-A Author who does it for a living: joyful. If you’re not engaged by your own writing, no reader is going to be, either. When the writer takes joy in the creation process, that comes through on the page.
I’ve been doing a lot of research into ancient mythologies lately. One of the most interesting books I’ve come across in this is Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman. It looks at the Goddess religions that were widespread in the ancient world, the cultures that worshipped these female supreme deities, and when and how they were replaced by the patriarchal cultures that eventually evolved into the religions of the present day.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff to unpack in this book, and I highly recommend it for anyone who’s interested in ancient mythology, specifically as a way to gain insight into the culture that developed it. One of the details that’s stuck with me the most is Stone’s breakdown of the Adam and Eve story as a kind of pre-Christian propoganda against the Goddess.
I’m a sucker for a mailing list. Anytime I research new journals and presses to submit to, or go to a conference or bookfair, I end up subscribing to a plethora of new lists.
Of course, doing this, I’ve signed up for a bunch of newsletters that were…less than helpful. Inevitably, I’ll come to realize my inbox is getting inundated and embark on a purge. But there are newsletters I’m always excited to see pop up in my inbox, and a few I’ve come to anticipate, to the point I’ll go searching through my spam folder to double-check if I don’t see them.
I did a post a few weeks back exploring what people mean when they talk about genre. For many, the word “genre” is synonymous with speculative fiction (and, often, the specific subgenres of speculative fiction that focus on technology, magic, or plot over the language and characters).
The truth is, though, that genre is simply a synonym for category. Every story—or, for that matter, every written work—can be assigned at least one genre label. There are also quite a few realistic subgenres, if not quite the proliferation of them that exists on the speculative side. And, just like speculative genres, these realistic genres and subgenres have their own sets of tropes and conventions that writers can follow or subvert as it suits their stories’ needs.
There are times ideas spring into your brain faster than you can get them on paper, but even the most prolific writer sometimes feels the frustration of staring at a blank page waiting for words that don’t want to come.
I’ve read several short story advice books that give the mildly infurating solution to “just start writing,” which is kind of like telling a lost traveler how great the subway is but not how to find the station. If I knew how to just start writing, I would already be doing it.
To be fair, I get what these writers are saying. Once you start putting words down, they build on each other sentence after sentence until you find that flow that carries you through to the end. The question is how to unlock those crucial first words to open the door for the story you want to tell.
Last week’s post looked at the big-picture worldbuilding in the Wheel of Time: the magic system, the language, and how Robert Jordan established the physical and temporal reality. But every good worldbuilder knows reality is a product of specificity. You need to have rules for your world (and follow them), but the details you include are what bring the world to life.
Of course, in a world this size, there are a lot of details. In this post, I’ll focus on the ones that I see as the most distinctively Wheel of Time and the most interesting from a worldbuilding perspective.
(As with part 1, this post contains some spoilers for Wheel of Time books 1-7, so if you want to avoid those it’s best to stop reading now).
The Wheel of Time series was my introduction to epic fantasy as a child, and the first invented world I really sunk my teeth into when I decided to start building my own. Coming back to it as an adult always feels a bit like returning home.
Of course, re-reading it as an adult, I can also understand the common critiques about the series. Regardless of whether you enjoy the story or not, though, there is no arguing that Robert Jordan was a master worldbuilder, in my opinion on the same level as Tolkien. The bulk of this worldbuilding happens in the first half of the series (books 1-7), and if you’re thinking “how the hell can it take someone 7 books to build a world?”—well, that’s the scope of the lands and history that serve as the foundation for the story.
(Note: Thar be spoilers up ahead. If you haven’t read the first 7 books of Wheel of Time and care about such things, probably best to skip this post).
