CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

Continuing our series on the power of myth… It’s very easy to fall for the modern temptation to try to explain something from where we stand now, projecting backwards in time those concepts with which we are familiar in an effort to understand those things which came earlier or lie beneath the comfortable things that we think we know. But while that seems perfectly natural, and is certainly commonplace, it runs counter to the raw creative process itself, which appears to be

As a writer, especially as one who is pondering the self-publishing route, it can be enormously helpful to think of what you’re doing as a business. I don’t mean ‘business’ in the sense of a group of people looking at graphs and meeting constantly with accountants or making decisions in sterile rooms in tall buildings - I mean ‘business’ in the sense that you have a product which you’d like to offer to a group of customers (readers). You might not wish to walk too far down

If myth is poetry, and the purpose of myth is to explain, as directly and as potently as the myth-maker can, the origins of the world as we experience it, then what we often see in myths at first are strange and faceless forces at work, inhuman, vast and almost incomprehensible. In the creation myth most familiar to us, for example, things begin from first principles: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkne

It can often seem that nothing can redeem the great disasters that occur within our lives; yet there are always a few small things. When I was seven years old, I lived in bliss in a small town in South Yorkshire, on the edge of the magnificently bleak Peak District and the howling moors. My world was woven from happy family routines and bordered by the deep valley in which the town nestled - I rarely saw beyond the brink of its hills. For me, a mysterious ‘North’ lay over t

As I’m in the process at this writing of reading through dozens of submissions for several upcoming Clarendon House Publications anthologies, I am gearing myself up for the writing of the rejection letters that are an inevitable part of that process. This got me wondering whether or not there’s a better word for what actually happens. The world ‘rejection’ brings with it all kinds of unpleasant connotations. ‘Reject’ comes from late Middle English and originally from Latin

In the last article in this series , we attempted to examine the Norse myth of creation as a story or piece of poetry, to see what emotional and spiritual value it had for us as modern readers without devaluing it as a myth, a ‘core story’, a collection of images and ideas which were and are an effort to capture basic truths about Life. It wasn’t easy. The World Tree Yggdrasil was just about comprehensible as an image of the mysterious, interlinked and untranslatable essenc

A story works because it resonates with fundamental psychological and spiritual realities that remain true, active and potent today, right now, for any reader. That’s what I asserted in Part One of this series. And it applies to whatever type of story we are talking about, from ancient myths through to modern day Ironies. The exact elements that ‘resonate’ can be grasped, understood and communicated, if we approach them in the right frame of mind. However, getting into that

I’ve written elsewhere about Canadian academic Northrop Frye and his work on understanding how fiction operates. I believe this to be some of the most startling and important research into our subject of writing fiction that has ever been done, and many of his ideas either underpin or parallel what I’ve outlined in my book How Stories Really Work . Starting from the viewpoint that works of fiction may be classified according to the power of action possessed by their protag