In case you’re reading this, but don’t pay attention to anything else on the internet anywhere, you may have missed this. Yesterday, the CDC (Center for Disease Control), released its plans of how it would handle a zombie epidemic. The announcement went viral. Their website crashed from the onslaught of traffic. There’s some sort of irony in there, I’m sure of it. Viral + CDC = ….
Anyway…So not my point today. Thank you to everyone who had thoughts about yesterday’s post and how it related to the day before. You’ve made two things very clear to me:
- This community really is as amazing and supportive as everyone boasts about
- I possibly spend too much time on back story and world building in my blog posts and need to learn how to make that translate to my fiction which is almost always lacking exactly that (and some day I’ll go back and write a post about gender in writing that doesn’t earn me some amazing feedback on my story ideas)
The entire discussion also got me thinking. One responder used the term ‘Prior Art’. For any of us who read fiction, it’s a concept we’re familiar with (though I’m not sure it was used quite correctly, and kind of reminds me of the term ‘social engineering’ in that misuse happens frequently but the implied meaning serves my need today so I’m going with it). I bet most of us off the top of our head can name at least a handful of books or movies based on a Shakespeare or Jane Austen story. Not just those that mimic the original, but those that re-imagine it.
Let’s see…of the top of my head…
- Ten Things I Hate About You
- West Side Story
- Clueless
- Throne of Blood
Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer weren’t the first people to create the sexy, seductive vampire. If you’ve ever read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, you know what I’m talking about. Then again, Ms. Meyer gets a lot of flack for her reinterpretation of vampires. Just like people loathe Disney for their HEA versions of fairy tales.
And religious sects argue on a daily basis over how their holy books should be interpreted, translated, read, lived. Just like there are mythological purists out there who balk at any incorrect display of the ancient gods. Did any of us actually know Zeus? And if not, how can we say with conviction that he’s an entirely separate entity from Odin? We don’t know the people who wrote those stories. Maybe it was just a difference of opinion, or handed down differently over generations.
I don’t fault anyone those opinions. However, I do think that as creative people, we should be open to creative exploration. Have you ever taken a trip to the grocery store, or read a news article, or attended a party, and been inspired by the events? Inspired enough to write a story, either fiction or non-fiction?
Do you tell everything exactly as you saw it happen? Well, no, not quite. Right? You embellish those points that add drama, you leave off those that don’t progress the tale, you fold, modify, and re-examine the event to pull a story out that conveys the same concept, but isn’t exactly the same event. It’s possible that brothers in real life become best friends in your story because you need that relationship to help things make more sense.
And we do the same thing with the stories we grew up with. We re-examine them. We keep the concepts we think are important, and shift other ideas surrounding it to make a logical story. We write stories about ninja who aren’t actually ninja, but rather, mercenaries for hire who only take the ‘good’ jobs. Or assassins who have no moral qualms about killing, but still only manage to assassinate those people who would threaten our freedom. Or superheroes who have sworn to protect innocent lives and deliver justice who do so by tossing villains in jail for a couple of months until a legal technicality lets them out on the street to wreak havoc again.
We suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy some of these stories. We toss aside prejudice and preconceived notion for the entertainment value of fiction. So why are we only willing to do it in some cases? What makes it okay for us to write or read stories about angels who defy their very nature of true knowledge and loyalty to God by seeking to strike down his chosen on Earth, but not for us to say Michael and Lucifer are drinking buddies? Why do we accept that Heracles actually went to hell…excuse me…hades and back, but not that he might still be alive today walking the beat in New York?
Why is it okay to imagine Moses looked like Charlton Heston, but not that Metatron might be a petite brunette who loves her tank tops and is waiting tables in Atlanta?
What is it that makes us draw the line when it comes to creative license? I’m not asking how to overcome it. I don’t think that’s possible on a wide-spread scale. I’m just trying to understand the psychology behind it all.
Hmm. This was a great point. I think there may be a swoon factor at work here. Vampires are the embodiment of sensual fantasy so when you mess with the archetype we’re used to…there’s fall out. Great post.
Edge of Your Seat Romance
I think we each have a few elements of classical literature or mythology that are sacred to us. We can deal with a certain amount of tinkering, but once that line gets crossed, we can’t deal.
The Scarlet Letter film crossed that line for me when it reinterpreted the novel as a story of female empowerment. The recent Les Miserables adaptation crossed it when they ended the film with a certain big event, proving they had no idea what the novel was actually about. Also, though I know everyone loves it, The Count of Monte Cristo did the same thing.
Those are the adaptations I can’t stand. The ones that try to invalidate the arc and message of the original work. The ones that don’t get it.
Valmont as a bored modern teenager who gets his kicks by messing with his classmates? Absolutely. Kat the shrew loves chick rock? Yay! There’s still a loyalty to the original message, even though liberties have been taken with everything else.
Creative License is an interesting topic. I don’t quite have an answer because it always varies as to what a person is willing to accept.
Then again, in my classes I also was taught the phrase “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” My profile image for blogger is an example, actually. The original picture was from someone else. The assignment was to take a painting/image that is rather well known and change it. While many of my classmates had classic paintings they added images like McDonald’s signs and such. I choice an image that had american flags and changed them all to pride flags. One of the best 2D assignments we had.
The thing is that if you are writing fiction influenced by mythology then your target audience is going to be people who enjoy that sort of thing. You are writing for people who like to see new takes on old mythological themes. So, to a certain extent, you don’t have to worry about people who dislike liberties taken with myth because no matter what you do they are not going to like your book. You’re not writing for them. You’re writing for the people who don’t mind the liberties.
@Dawn – would have loved to see that art. It sounds like a blast of a project
@Sarah M – You’ve got a really good point. I like that logic ^_^
GREAT post! Love it. 🙂
We simply like to tell stories …
I agree with most of these posts. You just never know what’s going to set someone off or what someone is going to love. If Percy Jackson can have Greek mythology set in present time, why can’t you put angels and gods in diners and aprons? Then again, I think (as one commenter pointed out), you’re almost (in essence) keeping the CHARACTERS but changing the MYTHOLOGY that we all know. And people are going to call you on it. And you’re going to cry foul because to you that’s not the point of your story. The point of your mythology is seeing where these different myths can fit in with one another. Changing it, puzzling it together, interpreting it in another way… everyone is going to think of it in a different way.
I guess you have to name your price. How much do you care about people perceiving your story as taking too much creative liberties with well-known mythologies?