Author's Note

It wasn’t until I turned thirty that I actually began work on a novel, and I was still as interested in the creative process as I was in the actual writing. There might be a certain amount of truth in the statement that I started writing to learn about the creative process. I instinctively realized that it spoke to something basic about the human condition. But I aborted my first novel after a hundred pages or so because I didn’t know where it was going. I ran out of story. I was puzzled about my failure, and wondered why the story didn’t reveal itself to me as I imagined it would.

Several years after this failed attempt, I started and finished another novel, but I knew it was rather rambling and not properly plotted. I attended some workshops on plotting and came away confused. I started reading books on screenwriting and drama because they seemed to cover the structure of storytelling more completely. Gradually it all came together as the plotting process I present here.
During this time, I read the comments of other authors concerning the nature of the writing experience. The interviews in The Paris Review were my primary source. A little later in life, I went through five years of psychotherapy; and following this trying but illuminating experience, one of the most important events of my life occurred. My company laid me off. Instead of trying to find work immediately, I decided to spend my time reading about ancient Greece, and planned an extended trip about the Greek mainland and islands. Prior to leaving, I read everything I could get my hands on concerning the archaeology and mythology of ancient Greece.

I spent ten weeks traveling Greece alone. Afterward, I began my research into the religion and myths of ancient Greece. My primary resources were the writings of university professors, classicists published by university presses. Early in this period, I came into contact with the writings of Karl Kerényi and Carl Jung. I had always known of Jung’s work because of his association with Freud, but I had never explored his writings to any extent. I had viewed him, naive as I was, as Freud’s junior partner. Surprisingly enough, I had never heard of Kerényi. These two would become my newfound heroes.
Freud had always been highly interesting, but Jung’s theory of the human psyche interested me even more. I’d had many experiences during my life that had gone unexplained, even through the five years of therapy. Jung came as a revelation. His explanation of the connection between human events and mythology was simply mind-blowing. Karl Kerényi was a professor of classics and the history of religion. He wrote a series of books in association with Carl Jung on the archetypes from Greek mythology that served the ancients as patterns for human existence. The profound insight this provided into ancient Greek culture and institutions I found astonishing, as well as the insight it provided into Western Civilization. Through the writings of these two, I delved deeper into this crossover field of psychology and mythology, and ran onto the archetypal psychologists James Hillman and Murray Stein. It was as if I’d found the Rosetta Stone for my own psychology, as well as a guide to human existence.

Then in the fall of 1999, I was approached by the head of the Continuing Education Department at New Mexico State University at Carlsbad to teach a couple of non-credit courses. She’d heard that I was a writer and interested in mythology. “Something on novel writing and Greek mythology,” she said, “would be of interesting to our older students.”
I was already primed. Since most of the students, who would be taking these courses, were college educated, some even retired teachers, I could treat the material as if I were teaching graduate school. My years of research could be put to good use. The course on Greek mythology, I taught primarily from the writings of Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. For the novel writing course, I pulled from everything I’d read through the years concerning storytelling: novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, and narrative non-fiction writers. I injected good doses of Jungian and archetypal psychology.

While developing the material for the two courses, I began to realize how connected the two subjects are, that novel writing, all storytelling really, is an outgrowth of the same psychological processes that had, through the millennia, created myth. The techniques of novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters all have their origin in Jungian psychology. All my research into these different disciplines came together as a sort of critical mass, which resulted in an explosion of ideas concerning the craft of novel writing that I describe here.
 

© 2009 David Sheppard. Site created by Artstudios.