How To Write A Myth

This video, I'm going to talk about how to write a myth. Now, a myth is an ancient story that was often made up by people at that time to explain some of the happenings of nature. Lightning, volcanoes, thunderstorms, all kinds of things, they didn't really understand.

They didn't have science there to explain it so they made up stories, and often, these stories involved supernatural beings - gods, witches, warlocks, dragons, all kinds of creatures as part of the story. There is also another form of mythology which is about a hero's journey. This is often a young person who goes on a quest of some kind to find a treasure or to solve a problem or rescue a princess, something like that.

One way to get aware of how to write a myth is to read a bunch of them. It's fun, too. Different cultures too, have different myths, so you'll learn a lot about the cultures as you do that, but let's say you're about to write one now.

So, you can begin with picking a part of nature that you want to explain through myth. You might say, ah, how to explain the existence of the north and south poles. Ah, why the leaves fall off the trees? Anything you care to choose.

And you should know a little bit about it anyways, so you might want to research about it first. And then, think about what does this part of nature represent? What do you associate with it? So, we use the example of the north and south poles, we think about polar bears, we think perhaps about ice birds, we certainly think about cold and freezing. So, those are some of the things you can use as an element of the story.

Another way to start a story like that is to think about the gods wanting to reward or punish a human being. So, in this case, there are two poles, there might be two people. So, we might think about, let's say brother and sister.

And if we say cold is part of it, how can we fit that in. Maybe they have cold hearts, they're very cruel to other people and that angers the gods. So, maybe the gods, to punish them, say send them to a very hot place but it doesn't actually thaw their hearts.

So, then, the gods make up an even colder place, or two places, that are even colder than their cold hearts and they banish one to the north pole and one to the south pole. So, that's just an example of coming up with a metaphor, being kind of creative about what the elements are, that relate to the thing you're trying to explain and making a story of it. So, just to summarize now, a couple of ways to write in this one is this one, we've just looked at explaining a force of nature somehow.

The other is the hero's journey. And the way you go about it is to think about it, what are some metaphors for the literal things, the actual things that are happening. I'd construct a story with a beginning to an end and involve some of these supernatural elements.

And that's how to write a myth. .