meta Monday: please ask re: how I approach characters and characterization, thematic material, voice, threads, prose, rp in general, writing as a whole, etc.

lily how do you weave in collective mythology into your characters' personal stories

pan! : because are always frustrated about the world around us and are always people looking for answers!

There are no original stories, everything that has happened has already happened and the things we are anxious about we have always been anxious about and so there is always a similar reflected story in one myth or another that reflects those concerns.

And so when my character is doing things, I look for the relevant reflections in myth and use them back and forth.

i love this.. also how myths change their meaning based on who's telling/hearing the story

I treat it the same way humans find faces and anthropomorphise everything around them. We read ourselves into other stories in order to help come to terms with our desires urges needs and struggles, and to how we relate to each other.

Also it's a great way to draw writing inspiration! Part of the best things I learned in writing school is that we should draw inspiration from the world around us and from other writers and mythology often has such beautiful verses that we can in turn mimic which makes it easier again to weave back into character POV

Mythology is never just abstract stories, it's our society, both shaping us as we learn it and then we go onto shape as yeah we read it to others.

I love to think of quotes from Medea for Deimos for instance

"Stronger than lover's love is lover's hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make."

(it's about a mother killing her children out of the scorn from her husband and it has some powerful as heck lines)

In the case where characters aren't as involved in mythology like borderlands, for Angel I look to natural events, I often have Angel think in terms of cosmic or natural disasters or technology as her mythology, because she has no personal relationship to any divine being to self relate except in the negative

Ala the line that is always too real from fight club "our fathers are are our model for God, my father left, what does that say about God?"

Her saving grace was the violence of the world around her and indestructible nature of others, so her self understanding stories are about strange ancient aliens and about personal drive.