I really can't compete with Drona's Manifesto stylistically--he may be a fascist, but what great prose!--but I feel obligated to counter it somehow ideologically, since that would piss him off.
Hmmm...what can I say about writing?
1) Myths matter. The stories we tell each other, the stories we tell ourselves: all myths. Did you know that someone who is born blind won't gain sight in adulthood even after restorative surgery? They tried it when the medical technology was first developed and learned the hard way that sight is more than just visual input from the eyes: your brain has to learn slowly, carefully, to organize shapes and colors into meanings. Without that ability, all those impulses coming through eyes to brain just give a person terrible headaches! Doctors know not to try it anymore.
Why was I telling you this? Oh yes. Because myths are something like that. If we don't tell ourselves stories, life is just one long terrible headache. With stories, we can give it some coherence, make sense of how things work and why, sketch out how to live and what we want. Ask questions. Very important, myths.
Good writing tends to myth, which, as it turns out, is a vast and sprawling garden.
2) Scientists. Basically specialize in myth. They squint down at atoms, make up stories to imagine them with (say, Niels Bohr's classic about how an atom is like a little solar system), then try come up with stories that will become tests to see if the old story needs work or not. The best scientists come up with stories that account for all the other stories better than the old myths have--the atom-as-solar-system myth is replaced with energy fields and quantum quarks and maybe if I didn't spend so much time watching reruns of Black maybe I would understand it all.
Stephen Jay Gould was a great scientist because he modified a particularly useful myth called the Theory of Evolution with a myth-within-a-myth called Punctuated Equilibrium. Great stuff.
3) Despite the abundance of good and useful myths, we get all kinds of wrong-headed and hurtful myths in our heads all the time! This is inevitable, I think, and part of being human. Writers are wrestlers, who try to tackle what they think are the bad myths in your head, or else get them in a headlock, or flip them over upside-down.
That's the core of the craft: all the rest is commentary.
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The original Greek meaning of the word "Mythos" may help those who don't like the use of the word myth to refer to science here.
ReplyDeleteMythos, like Logos, means explanation. It can also mean story, but the stories that qualified as myths weren't the "So a funny thing happened on the way to the grocery store..." kind of stories. They were the important stories, the stories that told how the world worked.
Myth was the only way of explaining how the world worked until a bunch of upstart intellectuals started saying that the old stories just didn't make sense. But that's another long story, which we could call the Myth of Philosophy.