What follows is about as close to a manifesto as I’ll permit myself. It starts with some things that have been inspiring me lately, weaves through some important commentary about our modern competitive narrative regime, and ends on a call-to-action on how to win that competition.
Also this post is too long for e-mail, so please click through to read it in the browser or app.
The Greek Myth Revival
I took the train round-trip to visit my family up in Montreal a couple weeks ago, and my original selection for the ride was Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway.
I wanted to follow up with Gnomon, his sci fi noir that almost gave me a stroke. I am not being hyperbolic here: reading Gnomon felt like downloading anti-surveillance programming straight to the brain, a text-based neural inoculation disguised as a gumshoe novel — Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, except encrypted.
The encryption method was myth. I will be getting to what I mean by that in a minute.
Titanium Noir ended up not hitting the mythic levels of Gnomon, though like Gnomon, it had many direct references to Greek myths. It was also shorter and easier to read than I expected, meaning I finished the whole book on the way to Montreal.
Needing to read something on the way back down, I went to small shop in Montreal and picked up The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. This time I explicitly had Greek myth in mind. It’s a beautifully written book that retells The Iliad from the perspective of a relatively minor character from the original story, Patroclus, Achilles’ confidant, sidekick, and, in this retelling, lover. One of The Song of Achilles’ best qualities is fully embracing the epicness and poetics of its source material, with full awe given to the gods, their magic, and their various motivations and personal vendettas. These gods are not merely metaphor but also really exist and are active in their own layer of society, one of the elements of Greek myth that most inspired me when I read them as a kid.
I want to say, then, that Miller’s book is great “because it represents the story as the Ancient Greeks actually saw things,” but what gives me pause is that I’ve heard that line before. That argument was the basis for so many fan defenses of the fascist, racist, and homophobic 2006 film 300, where the Spartans are white Europeans rather than olive-toned Mediterraneans, fighting against “Persians” that are either big gay effeminate black giants or subhuman, monstrous orcs, to save the “boy fuckers” of Athens (300’s framework for Washington, DC or at least governing bodies like it) from themselves and their peacenik Senators preaching weak girly things like diplomacy, who are revealed to be traitors of the nation corrupted by foreign coin and rapists to boot (but the woman agreed to it, so it’s her fault, too).
Someday I’ll tell you how I actually feel about 300.
Perhaps the 300 fans are right and that’s how the Spartans were actually racist, homophobic fascists and thus “saw” the Persians that way. Takes a leap of suspended disbelief regarding things like big fat saw-armed mutants, but at any rate, arguing “How the Ancient Greeks actually saw things” is absurd, in the sense that none of us know any Ancient Greek people to ask for their perspective.
What we do instead is read the texts through the filters of our cultural references: Greek Myth™ isn’t just the stories we have preserved, but all the ways we’ve told ourselves those stories over time, much the same way as history isn’t so much documentation of what happened but the narratives we’ve applied to the events to give them meaning to our time.1 There are absolutely people who have the same complaints about the historical muddiness of The Song of Achilles that I have about 300. There are very likely some people who fit in the overlap section of a Venn diagram of “People who believe 3002 is a historically accurate representation of something that actually happened in fact” and “People who think The Song of Achilles is a perverse re-writing of history for political reasons,” but I’m not going to expend any search engine effort checking to see if that’s the case.
Rather, this issue lead me to think about the generalized trans-media Greek Myth revival we’ve been seeing over the last decade broadly, and the upcoming version of The Odyssey that Christopher Nolan is creating (and its likeliness to be read in political contexts regardless of its actual content). It seems significant that media companies and artists alike are in a big hurry to tell these stories all over again, whether they adhere to the texts and historical understandings closely or not. Nolan, being an artist whose primary medium is scale, might be releasing the Olympus-sized climactic finale of this trend, or represent merely a large peak of the distribution curve from which another decade or two of smaller efforts will continue to crank away, retelling history in new contemporary terms.
Either way, the race is on to tell you how you should think about Greek Myth, and within that race raises the questions of whose concern it really is. However, Greek Myths function so well because they are interpretable across media, historical context, and regimes, making each one a game of interpreting both the original details of the story and why it’s been rewritten.
Thus, Gnomon-like, I have a cognitive inoculation for you, one that comes disguised in a French docuseries from 1989.
The Owl’s Legacy
Chris Marker, that time-traveller who gives you the answers to the questions you’ve not yet conceived, already responded to underlying cultural debate running the 2020s Great Greek Myth Revival.
The Owl’s Legacy is a 13-part docuseries on the global influence of Ancient Greek culture. As a Marker production it’s surprising because it’s superficially straightforward and is, to the best of my knowledge, the only talking head documentary he’s made. This approach makes it feel more accessible and less, well, Marker-y than his other work, something that disappointed me when I saw it at a retrospective screening at the Metrograph a couple-three years ago.3
As best as I can tell, this series is currently only available on Amazon Prime rental in the US, an irony that reminds me of comment I once heard about how prisons endeavor to keep revolutionary literature out of inmates’ hands and yet allow them free access to revolutionary works of Shakespeare: if only Bezos knew what content his servers were hosting. For that reason I’d recommend watching it as soon as you get a chance, because we don’t know whether it’ll be available at any point in the future.
Anyway, The Owl’s Legacy is about “the global influence of Ancient Greek culture”, as I said above, but also as I said above, this is just its surface, and Marker always enjoys plying the world of images to reveal the machinery underneath. The fact of Ancient Greek culture influencing modern culture is known and not worthy of a 5 1/2 hour long documentary, much less something that strikes me as interesting to Marker.
But what Marker is interested in is the flip-side of the signifier. How does Ancient Greek culture affect modern culture? By how we choose to seek in Ancient Greek culture antecedents to define our culture. In doing we’re entering an epistemological loop: it affects our culture because we see our antecedents in it; we see our antecedents in it because it affects us. It’s the act of searching that gives us something to find, and thus what Ancient Greece is to us today is whatever we need it to be to justify who we think we are today.
If the above paragraph feels too loopy for you, welcome to the Markerverse. But let me simplify it: in episode 4, “Democracy-or the City of Dreams,” Marker details how many of the same symbols and images that inspired democratic nations also gave causes and justification for fascism. In episode 6, “Mathematics-or The Empire Counts Back,” he delves into how the Greek’s struggle over the conception of zero to bring to question the philosophical conception that, since parallel lines and geometric shapes are “universal and ahistorical,” that they also resist narratives of “purity of form.” In each of our conceptions of what Ancient Greece stands for is an obverse side that may undermine the conclusions we want from it.
Some of the episodes hint at their argument in the titles themselves:
S1 E1 - Symposium-or Accepted Ideas
S1 E5 - Amnesia-or History on the March
S1 E11 - Misogyny-or the Snares of Desire
S1 E10 - Mythology-or Lies like Truth
Meanwhile, Marker, a fan of owls proper, adds one Marker-y aspect by constantly framing images of owls variously in the set decor and backgrounds of the talking heads. In many cases the owls loom over the speakers, like history haunting the historian. And we have to remember some rules when Markers does something like this: he genuinely loves owls; he genuinely loves images; images are not owls; images are not real. We also have to remember that Chris Marker’s name is not Chris Marker and that he identifies himself through a series of avatars, one of which is an owl.
Thus Marker is also pointing out that the narrative you’re seeing is not “How Ancient Greece affects world culture” but also how the talking heads chose to interpret the question; and then, on another level, it’s not just how the talking heads chose to interpret the question, but what parts of their conversation Marker chose to record and edit.
The owl’s legacy is not historical, but rather hauntological. Luckily the series doesn’t end on episode 12 (“Tragedy-or the Illusion of Death”) but episode 13 (“Philosophy-or the Triumph of the Owl”).
The Battlefield of the Past in the Culture War of the Present
"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Ol’ George Orwell in his cognitive inoculation disguised as the book 1984.
There’s a book I bought the second I read a description of it, which I then realized I don’t really want to read. The book is called The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz, and I don’t want to read it because we’re currently living it.
The concept is that time-travelers duke it out over competing timelines to change history to make the world the way they want it to be. In this sense the book is just a literalization of the competitive narrative regime the West entered in the mid-2010s.
To understand what I mean by “competitive narrative regime”, you may want to read the Epsilon Theory blog by Ben Hunt and Rusty Quinn, though they have long since paywalled much of their work and it would take you several months to get through it all. The gist is that throughout history, cultures go through periods of collaborative regimes and periods of competitive regimes. Collaborative and competitive in this sense refer to Game Theory definitions of each. By their reckoning, the US has been forced into a competitive regime, full of competitive games, from a previous period of collaborative regime that ran on collaborative games.
In a collaborative regime, history is history. We agree that this thing happened and caused that, and thus we find ourselves today the way we are. There are always people who challenge the mainstream history and provide alternative histories in order to sustain their subculture or subjugated cultures; but the mainstream dominant culture remains cohesive and people like Fukuyama show up to announce “The End of History.”4
In competitive regimes, history is a battlefield, fought with weapons of mass media. There’s no longer a unipolar dominant narrative of Who We Are and Where We Came From, but rather an urgent need to dictate Where We’re Going. The battle is existential: one narrative cannot be settled into hegemony without subjugating the others. Either 300 is historically accurate, The Song of Achilles is historically accurate, or neither are, but there’s no regime in which both are equally truthful. That is what is being decided.
This is the rigging underneath the oft-stated “collapse of shared realities,”5 which is another way of talking about our “crisis of trust” and so forth. In a collaborative regime, we trust authority, institutions, history, society, each other, even if we disagree on facts and policy. In a competitive regime, the game is on entirely based on who lays claim to the facts for the next few generations, regardless of whether you trust them.
Very important caveat here: it’s easy to imagine a collaborative regime as one filled with large groups of like-minded people operating in drone fashion, whereas competitive regimes as wastelands of individualistic survivalists living off the lay of the land with sharp wits and a good knife. In fact it’s actually the reverse: a collaborative regime enables individuals to strive for their own goals independently because they trust the basic infrastructure of the world around them to support them, whereas a competitive regime requires you figure out which people you can trust in order to build up resources you all can mutually rely on.
Think of it like this: a football game can be competitive because both teams trust the rules are enforced by a coach and a league and that bad behavior will be caught by a displeased and unsupportive audience, whereas fair play will be supported and cheered on, even if the team loses. Sports is collaborative regime-based competition.
But when all the referees are corrupt and the audience willing to flee over the slightest slight and the league keeps changing the rules arbitrarily, the games stop working and eventually the players must either quit (extinction) or go play a different game or for a competing league. For either alternative (game or league) to work, they must first collaborate on setting the rules and then collaborate on getting the resources (equipment, fields, etc) to play the games, then they must compete with the other sports or leagues to earn the attention of the audience.
This is known as “the rule of law.” A regime is competitive or collaborative based on its observance of the rule of law.
This raises the question of why some players, coaches, or other stakeholders ever seek to undermine the rule of law? The answer is, more-or-less, because they cannot win the game unless they change the rules.
Now, how does it come to pass that a league would let stakeholders start changing the rules? Or, why does a society begin to undermine the rule of law? Basically, there are always players that want to cheat, but they don’t gain enough collective power to start changing the rules unless the rules are already weakened by the league itself, for various reasons. An easy example is perhaps the league owners are corrupt, and just let whatever team wins that pays them the most money. However, sometimes the rules can be weakened by not-so-directly nefarious causes, such as reducing the time a player can hold onto a ball in order to make the game more exciting for television.
This latter example is actually really important for the next section.
How Myth Works
There’s a problem inherent to the operands of history: it keeps going. As such there can never really be narratives that are truly ‘settled.’ What can happen, and does throughout, I believe, most of human history, is that some stories are just too good to ignore, and settle into culture because they give the community the referents and sense of safety necessary to endeavor ever forth in the human condition.
Myths, then, can arguably be defined as narratives strong enough to settle cultures on.
That sounds pretty pat, until we remember the legacy of the owl: as for sports, so for narratives themselves. The impact of Ancient Greece on US culture and democracy is a self-actualizing loop, until it isn’t. Then we either rewrite them or reject them in favor of new myths. It’s both true that cultures rely on myths to maintain a consistent identity, and yet the myths themselves are malleable to how the culture decides to interpret them.
At three different points I’ve called a piece of media a “neural inoculation.” Those three works are Gnomon, 1984, and The Owl’s Legacy. They are not the only inoculations, but they are a good starting point to define myths, because myths are neural inoculations, and narratives strong enough to inoculate you against mind control can appropriately be called mythic.
Not all narratives are mythic. In fact very few are. You can’t even rely on the same author to always deliver mythic quality work: Titanium Noir, though very entertaining and exquisitely written, is not mythic. Gnomon is mythic because it restructures your brain to reject neural surveillance systems currently sought after by tech industrialists and authoritarian governments alike. 1984 is mythic because it restructures your brain to be aware of the politics of language in ANY regime, whereas Animal Farm is just an extended metaphor for communism specifically.
Everything Chris Marker ever made is mythic though, don’t play me.
But what it does is not quite the same thing as how, so I’m merely describing mythic storytelling without giving you the tools to do it. And in that sense, looking at the original myths is required.
My personal history with the Greek Myths helps me understand the difference between mythic and quotidian storytelling.
I loved the Greek Myths as a kid because I loved fantasy stories. Greek Myths were entertaining in the same way that Lord of the Rings, DragonLance, and the Magic: The Gathering books were entertaining: there were humans, gods, legendary beasts, magical rules, and they were all mixed together and had their own motivations, powers, and abilities. All of this was fun and cool.
The difference is that, as a middle schooler, I couldn’t wrap my mind around how the Ancient Greeks actually believed these stories. Sphinxes and minotaurs are cool fucking creatures, but obviously nobody actually saw one. How could they actually believe these things?
Yet on the other hand, my teachers explained to me, these characters gave explanatory power to phenomena outside humans’ grasp at the time. Where the heck did spiders come from? Well, this one weaver girl named Aradne offended Athena by challenging her to a weaving contest. Why are the stars aligned like that? Well, this one hunter Orion had such incredible feats, the Gods chose to bring him to Olympus.
Why is life so god-damned challenging? Well because the gods damned us with challenges. They’re petty, vengeful folk with vicious pride and absolutely choose sides in conflicts and warfare. You really better respect them and burn offerings in their honor or they will fuck you up.
In short, myths are metaphors… that can kill you. Athena, she of the owl, represents wisdom. She also will absolutely split your skull open if you offend her. The wisdom she offers is as powerful as her ability to leave your brains on the steps of the agora. She’s a concept, but she’s real.
Myths are metaphors you actually believe. In order to make mythic-quality stories, you have to believe in the sorts of stories that can actually come to life and kill you.
Myths Versus Conspiracy Theories
Conspiracy theories have metaphors. People really believe them. Does that make conspiracy theory myth?
There’s another work I’ve been reading lately that’s been making me think about the battle of narratives in the culture war, an ongoing comic book series called The Department of Truth written by James Tynion IV and drawn by Martin Simmonds.
This concept is very similar to The Future of Another Timeline in the sense that it’s about an ongoing war over the nature of reality through battles of stories. In this series, every conspiracy theory is as ‘real’ as the number of people who believe it and how strongly they believe in it. As such, in order to keep reality confined and manageable, the US government has a “Department of Truth” tasked with ending conspiracy theories — through counter-programming, investigation, and yes, even murder.
Antagonizing the Department of Truth is “Black Hat”, a person or group intent on freeing the bounds of reality to competing belief systems. Their argument is as compelling as it is terrifying: why shouldn’t reality be democratized? Besides, doesn’t the existence of the Department of Truth itself indicate a conspiracy to suppress people’s independent truths? Without getting too into the weeds of the plot here, in relatively quick order it’s hard to read The Department of Truth without being intensely suspicious of who, or what, any character actually really is or says they’re for.
Tynion is deeply knowledgable about conspiracy theories, and his research is impeccable, both in detailing the contours of the conspiracies but also their historical genesis and development, as well as the whys and wherefores they take hold on certain characters. And he’s compassionate about it, too. One of the most touching episodes concerns a father whose obsessive search for Sasquatch is driven by his fierce desire to reconnect with his son — who rejected him because of his obsession with Sasquatch. This self-defeating, downward spiral logic underlines a lot of the complexities we have when dealing with the concept of conspiracy theories and people’s inabilities to let them go.
Nevertheless, I believe Tynion knows what a friend once told me: conspiracy theory is about grief. If Tynion doesn’t have that idea in mind in those words, he certainly represents it in how he writes this series. Conspiracy theories are mythic on the surface but lack agency underneath: they are fragile, and prone to collapse. The pulpa can come to kill you, but you are not in equal grounding to fight back.
I would say conspiracy theories flood in to replace when the mainstream myths fail to protect a person or community. Once one narrative dies, others compete for viability, “these are times of monsters” style. A conspiracy theory ceases to be a conspiracy theory when it becomes true, wherein true = accepted generally by mainstream society as rule of law. Very few do; the rest we call history.
This is why charlatans, fraudsters, and cult leaders thrive in marginalia of conspiracy theory: because at root, they’re pretty good storytellers. This is also why don’t make good leaders in mainstream society: because they’re good storytellers, but not good enough. They tell stories that some people can believe some of the time, but struggle to find stories that everyone can believe all of the time.
On that note:
Why We’re in a Culture War; or, Why the MCU is Not Mythic
The spoils of culture war go to the best storytellers. This is the definition of history: the spoils of culture war.
Let’s go back to the sports analogy: there are always players that want to cheat. Similarly there is always underground cultures, alternative cultures, subcultures, and subjugated cultures preserving, curating, protecting, and developing its own mythology with its own niche of participants. When the league fails to maintain its rules, the cheaters take over — when mainstream culture fails to tell coherent stories that protect its citizens and gives them cause and direction, the “alternative facts” rise.
Why does the league fail to maintain its rules? Corruption, perhaps. The stories started to serve only the interests of the few rather than the whole. Or perhaps for less malevolent reasons, such as forcing the game to speed up to make it fit for television rather than fit for athletics, skill, or tactics:
the stories started to be prioritized based on their marketability rather than their cultural value.
I’m lucky to have found The Department of Truth. I’ve only recently getting into comic books at all. I never got into comic books before, because the majority of mainstream comic books are run by a duopoly of superhero IP, Marvel and DC, and I never found the characters as interesting as people would tell me they are. In fact with comic book characters, often people’s explanation of what attracts them to their favorite heroes strikes me as far more interesting than any of the actions they take on the page.
Nevertheless, much of my life has seen the gradual invasion of comic book-based superhero references into ever more media and popular culture, culminating in the MCU. And during this roll-out, academics were quick to point out those stories’ structural similarity to myths: you had gods that interacted with humans, rules of might and magic, morality plays backed by action and tactics, “pantheons” of interconnected and interrelated stories and characters, often choosing sides in significant, world-altering ways.
The structure is there. The issue is that save a few really good individual runs, I don’t get the impression that Marvel or DC as companies “believe” in their characters in quite the same way as some of their best writers. And even their best writers, I doubt, really believe these characters exist in the sense of walking among us, with the potential to get involved, intervene, and do something fatally consequential to our organic selves.
But they do believe, with cause, that the characters are money-printing machines.
Is Spider-Man Peter Parker, Ben Reilly, or Miles Morales? Is he white, black, or black and white? Regardless of which “universe” we roll with, no writer of any single Spider-Man movie thinks he’s gonna show up and punch them in the nose. Which would not preclude Spider-Man becoming a mythic figure if they at least believed in some moral force that, should they behave like one of his villains, would both figuratively and literally punch them in the nose. I don’t get that belief out of these stories.
This doesn’t mean they’re not good stories and they’re not entertaining, they just aren’t quite mythic. Yet. They could be, provided they are driven by belief in something more powerful than their profitability. This I do not think will happen. I love the Spider-verse movies, but would not call them a neural inoculation against threatening cognitive or moral antagonists of any kind.
However, when you see some MCU movies that seem to gain a life of their own beyond the exercise in corporate synergy, you tend to see there’s something about them that resonates on deeper cultural levels than their mere commercial viability. Spider-verse is a fairly good example because it recognizes the Metaverse as a conflict of competing timelines rather than the excuse to ignore inconvenient and costly things like continuity between productions. Black Panther spoke to black Americans by worldbuilding around their cultural symbols and designs rather than white American ones. These things matter.
I use the MCU as a metonym for not just the arts and entertainment world today, but the entire mass media and our communication technology generally. Progressively since the 1980s, the stakeholders in charge of communication technology, whether for art, entertainment, journalism, editorializing, documentary, history, or whatever, has made series after series of decisions to focus on what stories are easier to sell than what stories have more cultural power, and the result is that the storytelling got so weak that eventually it stopped protecting people from the mere liars and cheats. And so the liars and cheats have taken over.
This is not just a top-down gatekeeper shareholder fault, it’s also a bottom-up technology user-base fault. “Legacy media” as the current narrative names it both faces competition from new media (as the current narrative has long since moved on from naming it) while doing an horribly lame duck job defending their turf with any cultural production worth noting. Above, I linked Ted Gioia’s article “Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in 12 Months”. He also writes positive articles about how Substack is challenging the Legacy Media and points the way to a better future. Gioia’s alarms about modern culture AND his celebrations of Substack are the same coin. You don’t get Substack’s ascent without a competitive narrative regime.6
Would Substack exist without a competitive narrative regime? Or is Substack really causing the competitive narrative regime? Neither and both. They are the image of the owl. They co-produce each other.
One last thing before I bring you the inspiration part of this inspiration post:
You Don’t Have a Choice
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” ~~Philip K. Dick
There’s real things and then there’s reality and then there’s what we decide to agree reality is. Denying the rock exists won’t prevent it from stubbing your toe, but denying a narrative exists could cause people to stone you. Things get messy in the metaphysical layers.
The thing about cultural regimes is that they impact your lives whether you care to acknowledge them or not. If you were a writer, artist, filmmaker, musician, storyteller of any type in 1997, your platforms, industries, markets, and audiences would be operating under a collaborative structure that would assume for you the peacefulness to make independent, self-representing artwork that others could elect to sponsor and support. Today, the platforms, industries, markets, and audiences are operating under a competitive structure where resource allocation is existential and you must team up with trustworthy collaborators to commit to artwork of cultural production.
One small example of where this matters is on the discourse surrounding the concept of whether or not “artwork should be political.” Substack is lousy polluted with this debate. There are the yesses, there are the nos, there are the “everything is political” takes.
None of them matter: that’s collaborative narrative environment discussion. Politics is a society’s debate on how to move forward. When the society is run by people who are competing over how to tell history and define who we are, political art can only be reactive instead of productive, always letting the people with access to the most resources set the topics of conversation. Political art can be productive in collaborative environments when resources are allocated. It’s no mistake that under a competitive narrative environment, the US federal government is defunding public media while businesses are trying to automate their creative capital. When you know your stories are in competition to create reality itself, you try to cull your competitors from the field.
Either way, you’re working in an environment where the audience will be reading your work as political whether you intend them to or not. You don’t get to choose whether your art is political: they will deem it. Since there’s no escape, you might as well mean it.
Remember: in a collaborative narrative environment, people set up debates. In a competitive ones, they prevent the other person from talking. Where they can’t directly suppress resources to alternative voices, they will divert attention. Here’s at least one primer to get orientated in your new narrative map.
This is the world you live in whether you want to acknowledge it or not. The only way to survive is to find the people you trust and build each other’s resources together, and insist on telling only the stories you believe in so strongly you know they can kill you.
Thus: Rules for Mythic Storytelling
The spoils of history go to the mythmaker.
99.9% of you will never achieve a truly mythic narrative. I myself worry I may never be able to.
However with all the references I dumped above, with all of the ways I’ve come to be thinking about this, what I bring to offer here today, fat and fed off the the most nutritious fields of recent literary, cinematic, and graphic stories, is guidelines for telling competitive stories:
1. Metaphors that you believe in
This has two parts, the metaphor, and the belief.
In a collaborative narrative environment, it’s enough to tell personal stories as a matter of self-representation. Since culturally the mainstream is on the same page, the story rests on the foundation of that mutual trust and this new iteration is part of the shared public discourse realizing the world around it. When it’s something like underrepresented voices, these stories help introduce and invite them into the mainstream, albeit with effort.
In a competitive narrative environment, the story must survive on its own. It thus must be stronger, broader, and more realized: it’s not enough to do it out of self-recognition but human recognition. People across cultures, backgrounds, and their own idiosyncratic tastes must perceive the reality of the story without understanding its references. To avoid weakening the story with lowest common denominator tropes, you instead extend its power by lifting the stakes to our shared human condition. Metaphor is your tool for that.
It’s not enough to use metaphor as figurative language or a writing technique. This is where David Lynch and his Catching the Big Fish technique is helpful. There’s the story you want to tell, but there’s also something deeper that makes you need to tell it. That need is going to have some weird juju around it you’ve never seen in stories before, that you normally look to craft standards to get passed. You have to do the opposite now: take the weird juju stuff and make it the center of the work.
This takes a lot of time, effort, and risk. There is no easy way that is not also a weaker way.
The second half is the belief in it. Storytellers are taught in terms of morals and themes, the old Campbellian journey as justification for itself, cross the thresholds and save the cat. However in this paradigm, a pretty good indication that you’re going in the wrong direction is if a character can state the thesis in a line of dialog or your story is pointing toward a specific issue.
Again, you need to be looking deeper than that: not just the thesis, but the structure of your moral universe that gives you your thesis; not just the issue you’re stressing out over, but why it and issues like it continue to disturb you and never seem to be completely defeated. Themes in storytelling are downstream of the story’s moral universe, and your moral universe is only as strong as your morality.
How much do you believe in yourself?
2. The more reality-backed, the better
Two genres are the most mythic-enabled: biography and science fiction.
The thing about many of the Greek myths and the belief in them is that many of the characters were real. Stories of their exploits became famous, then legendary, then mythic, through process of cultural telephone.
Sometimes you see this genesis in modern day: when I was a kid, Edison was a genius inventor and Tesla was this weird subcultural figure admired mostly by hipsters and cranks. These days Edison largely seems to represent the corporate IP thief the public is increasingly dismayed by, whereas Tesla was a free-thinking visionary that leant us key technologies and the richest man in the world’s public corporation’s name.
Madeline Miller made a whole thing of Patrocles’ and Achilles’ relationship out of the documentation she had while Frank Miller made a whole thing about 300 Spartans holding the pass at Thermopylae from his favorite childhood movie. These things develop out of texts in the record that can be reclaimed, particularly if you seize the spark of recognition within them on how they represent your true moral universe.
In other words, mythic storytelling answers “why are we the way we are today” oftentimes by pointing out something in the past and saying, “Same as it ever was.”
Science fiction achieves the same aims through speculation based on the realities of today. Rather than past-oriented to describe the now, it describes what the storyteller sees now to illustrate the moral arc of the future. “If we start here, we end up there.” This process works the more accurate the effects reflect how we see things now.
3. Employ Dramatic Irony
One of the main reasons I believe Greek Myths particularly have such sticking power, is because they made me burn in rage with how unfair they seemed sometimes.
Oedipus: his father abandons him as a child because Laius hears the prophecy that Oedipus will kill him; Oedipus kills Laius because he doesn’t know that Laius is his father. Orpheus can’t trust that Eurydice is there because he can’t hear her; she disappears because he checks to confirm. This stuff really twisted my noggin as a kid.
Robert McKee discusses dramatic irony as a more satisfying resolution than a happy or a sad ending: the protagonist gets what they want, but loses what they need; or the protagonist loses what they want, and ends up better and happier. On a lower level I believe a key thing to avoid in storytelling, particularly storytelling that deals in metaphors and myth-making, is a protagonist winning against the forces of evil entirely backed on the righteousness of his moral code. The moral code drives his beliefs but his decisions still have to bring about the consequences.
It’s two parts of the coin: why is this always happening? And how do we resolve it. Obviously you can’t resolve it completely, then it’s not “always” happening. But we can’t give up, because that way lies extinction. Thus we fight to survive, and in so doing continue the conflict that’s always happening.
4. High-level presentation
This is one of my personal weaknesses, to a point where the work I need to do to overcome it is going to brutal, but overcome it I must: for a narrative to become mythic quality, it must be immediately and visibly well-presented.
This means you can’t just write a great book, it has to have great printing and design. You can’t just compose a beautiful song, you have to record it with exquisite clarity performed by exceptional talents. You can’t just four-wall a movie, you have to develop a whole danged distribution strategy complete with packaging, design, and marketing. Artists, at this moment in time, are not only on the usual hook to make good art and run their own business, but to outdo the galleries, museums, competitions, and shows at their own game.
This is very difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, but unfortunately necessary. The stakes drive ever higher the more mythic your storytelling is.
It’s not enough to just “work on the things you love and the money will follow.” That may have been true before the Internet but after the advent of Facebook, it’s a complete lie. These days, work on the things you love and everyone else will steal it to train their chatbot; or follow the money, and be employed in the industry of slop production.
High-level presentation cannot happen if you don’t have high-level work, so step 4 necessarily follows steps 1-3. The next step is a little more muddy:
5. Determine the people and groups you can trust
The problem underlying step 4 is a resource one: Mainstream society is currently obliged to prohibit you access to the resources you need to tell the stories of the future. I can’t state this any more clearly, it’s not an accident that the US government is cutting arts funding while the corporate world is laying off creative professionals. They know that if better stories are told than the ones they’re telling, their narratives will collapse, because they are weak stories built on the basis of fraud and lies. Normally these things could collapse on their own account, but they have incredible resource pull to keep it going for an indeterminate length of time.
It is not worth waiting for the inevitable reversion to mean. Plus, even if you do, you have no guarantee that the new stories and new regimes that sprout will be gods or monsters. The only way to tilt these to your favor is to build your own resources and make your stories live as long as possible.
The individual seeking self-representation in an industry is already lost. That’s collaborative world thinking. The competitive world survivalists aren’t trying to save the world, they’re building the next one. That means finding, building, and creating resources from scratch.
Which means community building, which means being very clear who you go to when you need help with what resource need, and being very clear and willing to put in your own help to the people who need it. And they will need it, and if you don’t show up for them they will drop you.
This section, too, is difficult. Because the world, particularly the entertainment and media world, is full of people willing to take advantage of people who are willing to help. So you have to be on your toes. If you’re helping other people and they’re not paying in kind, you have to find more people. If other people are helping you out, you have to deliver for them and you have to find a way to come back around to them.
Community management is its own full-time job, and in a competitive narrative regime is not one that you can outsource to institutions. Just like step 2 has you taking the work of publisher, platforms, and distributors upon yourself, step 3 has you taking the networking events, fundraising, investing, equity, and dividend distribution upon yourself.
This is not fair, but it’s the world we live in.
The lucky thing is that you can do step 5 while working on steps 1-4. As long as you keep telling your story, you’ll find people interested in telling it too. And since this is not a solipsistic world, when you hear stories you feel need to be told, it’s your responsibility to offer help.
The other good news is that resource acquisition is not a zero-sum game. The larger efforts of people who crave power and control are always toward the lie that resources are zero-sum, but they are rarely so, and never creative resources. The more collaborators you get the more will join you. The more money you get, the more you can work on the artwork itself or its presentation, which attracts more people to it and so on.
This is a good point to mention I am open for collaborations.
6. Make your work exist
Every now and then there’s an idea I have that I want to stamp on a mallet to run around smacking people in the forehead with, such that the statement gets scarred right where they can see it in the mirror every morning, and my current one is
If your work does not exist physically, it does not exist.
Sorry, but your YouTube Insta-blog thing does not exist as a work of art unless it’s in a format you can hand to someone at a cafe and they can take home to watch themselves without expensive, bespoke, or novel equipment.
You must print your books. You must make Blu-Rays and archival quality DCPs of your films. You must etch your music on vinyl or electronic tape. You must paint on canvas and frame your photographs. You must do these things or you do not have a copy of them.
This argument is two-fold:
One, learn the concept of an artist’s archive and what archival quality really means. This is how you manage and control and actually own your work. It’s very medium dependent, and for new digital arts like webpages and such is an open development (to which there is, actually, some promise in the concept of NFTs if not the current practice). This is also how you account for what you’ve actually done. It’s the real “proof-of-work” that no NFT engineer can ever match.
But the second is a platform warning. The Internet used to be a distributed network of independently operated servers. That ended when everything was centralized under cloud computing and is now being scaled up with data-centers. Whatever you have online is owned by people like Sundar Pichai (Google), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), or Elon Musk (X). They can do whatever they want with it. They steal it for AI training, the can delete it whenever they choose for any reason even vaguely related to their user agreements, they can alter it without your permission and they can hold it against you in court.
And … you never know which one of their narratives we call a “company” will just… collapse, leaving your url as nothing more than a 404 error and all the work you’ve uploaded it vanished to some silicon wafer well beyond any individual’s ability to find, less retrieve. This warning goes double for the people exporting their full writing archives to Substack, a not-yet-profitable endeavor backed by not-verifiably-dependable venture capital that can change on a dime.
In sum, you have to build the factory, the distribution, the retailers, the product, and its museum quality preservation storage yourself. There’s no way you’re going to do that for a reactive thinkpiece about Cracker Barrel’s new logo. You might do that, but people would think it’s bizarre, for a short film or a collection of short stories. To bring people on this adventure, your work must ascend higher.
It must be mythic quality.
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History is the history of how we tell ourselves history.
a stylized adaptation of a stylized comic book adaptation of a stylized movie adaptation of a play vaguely based on an event that we’re not very clear about
Disclosure: I did fall asleep through a couple episodes
Sounds peaceful except that whole aside about subjugated cultures. For now I recommend not reading the words ‘collaborative’ and ‘competitive’ in inherently benevolent or malevolent connotations.
I do hate this term because none of this is real. It’s media. The image of the owl is not an owl etc.
Similarly, you don’t get Substack’s ascent without Trump’s, though I mean that in about as neutral a sense I can possibly state anything about Trump.