Mythology and Folklore

 This site was really interesting! I had a lot of fun browsing through the articles and such. The first one I read was the clothes make the character. That was interesting to me, because I think that applies more for a tv show than for a book. I have not mentioned clothes a single time in any of the stories in my Storybook project. However, there is an emphasis on clothing in books with things like livery or family seals or such. In Game of Thrones, for instance, the different houses wear their house colors and sigils, and that is how we differentiate groups of people. Or in Harry Potter, where they wear cloaks in the wizarding world and ‘regular’ clothes in the muggle world. I also liked the articles about how to describe different things without using the same words over and over. I tend to lose words when I write for some reason, or I will know the word that I need but not be able to think of it, so these articles would be a great help. I really liked this site!     ...

  The power of creative constraints: Constraints aren’t the boundaries of creativity, but the foundation of it.   What makes a hero?: Talks about the monomyth, and the things that heroes go through. ‘A hero with a thousand faces’   How to build a fictional world: There are stories all around you all the time. Whether or not you tell them is up to you   What Orwellian really means:   Language plays an extremely important role in what we believe/thing/do/say.   What makes something Kafkaesque?: We rely on increasingly convoluted systems of administration which have very real impacts on our lives. The world we live in is one we create, and therefore, can change for the better.   How to write descriptively: There are many reasons to write. The point of fiction is to transport someone directly into the story.   Beware of nominalizations (zombie nouns): Nouns made from other parts of speech are nominalizations. They cannibalize t...

 Microfiction seems like it would be difficult, mainly because you have to be extremely concise with your language. I think if I were to write microficiton, I would start out with a regular story, whittle it down to like, three hundred to five hundred words, and then go from there. I think doing that would be the easiest way. The most heartbreaking example of microfiction I can think of is that six word story—For sale: baby shoes, never worn. I think everyone knows that example. I did not touch the two sentence horror stories, mainly because I would probably freak myself out and not be able to sleep tonight.  My favorite microfiction (so far!) is the tiny love stories. There were some very poignant ones about learning how to love people in quarantine, either because you have been drifting apart in recent years, or because you had just moved in together.                                    ...

 When we hear the word ‘myth’, we hear something that is not true. For example, if you swallow a piece of gum, it does not stay in your stomach for seven years. That is a myth. However, there are other kinds of myths, that have significance and staying power. There are some people that say myths only include creation stories, some that include gods, and some that include heroes. When mythologists first began studying myths, it was thought that they were ‘primitive cultures’ way of explaining what was happening in the world around them. When mythologists combined with anthropologists, they started focusing on what ‘primitive cultures’ knew rather than what they did not know. Now, people are looking at the context of how/when/why people tell myths. Heroes appear in stories of just about every culture for every age. What makes heroes? Fighting villains, being a protagonist, being a good role model? Monomyth—series of events that appear in multiple stories across multiple culture...