Mythurgy

The Story

One day, the Author woke up and said to herself “This story I am in, how do I write it?”

Inspiration

“Obviously first I’ll need inspiration. That’s really the starting point. To write a story without being inspired is like living a life without being born.”

She paced up and down. “But that must have already happened, because the story has already begun. Did I do it at the start, and not notice? Of course I couldn’t notice, because it hadn’t started yet. But how did I do it before it had started? When was the start? Was it when I spoke to myself? Was it before then? That wasn’t the start of this monologue, this came after the pacing. And it wasn’t the start of the pacing either. Or this sentence. There’s always a start if you look for it, and inspiration is always there, beginning everything, all the time.”

So the Author went looking for inspiration, and found it everywhere she went. Inspiration made objects, it sustained people, it flowed out of icons into the Author’s hands so she could shape it into her story. Her unique story, which nobody else could write.

Idea

And all this left her to wonder, “Why can I do this?”

“Because you have me,” said her Muse.

“That’s all very well to say,” said the Author. “But how can you do it?”

“I can’t do it either. I’m just an idea, an idea that’s been had before, and an idea that’ll be had again. But an author with an idea, that’s where the magic happens,” mused the Muse.

“Don’t beat yourself up. Just because you’re an idea, doesn’t mean you’re not real.” The author smiled. “Ideas can do anything. They’re figments of the imagination, can do anything it can imagine. A good author can find them anywhere, bring them to life and make them hers. And if this story is going to go somewhere, I’ll need some.” So she grasped her Muse and her inspiration and stepped into the imagination.

Ideas swirled around her. Some were bad ideas, and she got rid of them, but others were vibrant and interesting. She gathered those, fed them inspiration and prepared to take them back to help her write her story.

“But wait,” the figments said. “We're from other stories, not yours. We can’t be in two at once.”

The Author smiled. “Of course you can. There’s any number of stories an idea can be in, and and number of ideas a story can have. There’s no end to imagination, so all of them are found here somewhere. You just need to find them, and give them a path into your work.”

Plot

“This is an awful lot of ideas you have,” said the Muse. “At this rate your story will be very confused.”

“You’re right,” said the Author, and she sorted through what she had gathered, picking out the important things and seeing which plot they lent themselves to.

The Authors

And so the Author had together all the parts of her story, and began to write. But things kept going wrong. Before long she had realised that other authors were writing too, and everyone was writing over one another and producing a terrible mess.

“We can’t be having with that,” said the Author, and stormed off to find them.

The Obsessive

First she found a man hunched over a pad, scribbling like mad. His whole room was covered with pictures of the single thing he loved.

“You’re another writer!” he cried at the sight of the Author. “Do you see what I’ve written! Isn’t it cool! It’s got my love in it, and that means it’s amazing.”

And the Author read his story, and it did have his love in it. Always and forever, in every scene, whether it helped or not or was even relevant. She was horrified, it was ruining the tale! So she tried to write away from it, but he always shoehorned it back in, so she wrote him into a corner and left him to his madness. Surely the others would be more tractable.

The Creep

Next she found a sneering man dressed all in black, giggling as he wrote lines in thick black ink. He crowed as his ideas fell into misfortune, and warped them further as they tried to crawl back out.

The Author recoiled, but the man grabbed her. “Isn’t it hilarious? A nice dark story, where they all go mad and die. Help me write one, you’ve got some great ideas to put a spin on.”

“But what’s the point?” the Author cried. “Why take a story that way?”

The man laughed. “Who needs a point? Who cares about the story? I love this kind of stuff! It’s more important than some silly girl’s game.” He gripped her and tried to steal her ideas, but she wrote over his foul notions with heroic victory, and hurried off before he had more.

The Coward

And then she found a man at a desk, typing page after page of nice neat prose. The Author looked it over, and it was well-formed, but so dull.

“It’s not all obsessive," she said, "And it’s not all creepy, but... the same thing happens every time in this tale. Shouldn’t you try to change it?”

“No, that can’t be!” said the man, horrified. “If I do it differently... who knows what’ll happen? It could end up all wrong. I love these ideas, and I don’t want to ruin them.”

The Author was skeptical. “Isn’t the whole point of writing inspiration, and creation? If you do the same thing every time, you just end up killing the life in your ideas. There’ll be no imagination left.”

The man’s horror turned to anger. “You’re ruining it! You’ll pollute my stories!” And he trapped her in a web of rules, of narrative and character and what was allowed to happen. She cut through, first finding new stories within the rules he thought were perfect, then proving those rules weren’t needed at all. The man fell back amid the ruins of his cage, and the Author escaped once more.

The Peer

Last she found a man with a notepad, wandering like her in search of a way to continue his story. She spoke to him, and he to her, and they found they disagreed on many ideas, and he was more than a little arrogant. But they were happy in this disagreement, and the Author found some of his concepts appealing enough to use herself.

Together they wrote stories without obsession, cruelty or fear, and took command of the narrative from the others who caused so much trouble.

The End

And after writing for so long, the Author found her story coming to a close. She reached the last chapter, and put her pen down. Because for once in her journey, she had absolutely no idea what to say.