The Idea

This is where it all starts. You won't go anywhere until you have an idea. Ideas can come from literally anywhere, so I won't elaborate too much on how to come up with a good idea. Just be observant, use you're own experience, look at headlines, combine those ideas, etc. There is no set way to get an idea. I do, however, highly recommend that you write all of your ideas somewhere, even the bad ones.

Let me start by explaining what my idea was for this portion of the website. I wanted to have a story that would allow me to explain the process of storytelling as I unfold the story. When I explain character development, I want to demonstrate what I am explaining through the characters of my story.

The problem then arose to find a story that could demonstrate almost every aspect of storytelling. This I'm afraid to say is impossible, as there are too many methods of storytelling to put into one story. For instance, I am limited to a small sample of genres (which I will discuss in a later section). Do I make it a romance, action/adventure, horror, fantasy, science-fiction, historical, etc. I could not find a logical way to make the story fit into all of these genres.

After some thought I decided to make the story a fantasy. Let me explain why I did this. Fantasy is not a new form of storytelling. In fact, it has been around for millennia. Were we to work our way backward we would find The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, who is generally considered the father of modern fantasy. Going further back we find the Grimm Fairy Tales. Even further back we find tales like The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser which perhaps embodies the concept of the "hero's journey," which has become so popular today. Other ancient forms of fantasy include Beowulf, nearly all forms of Arthurian literature, and many other stories involving fairies, dwarves, or the land of Faerie. In short, it is a very old tradition.

What I believe to be at the heart of fantasy is the concept of myth. When we go back far enough, fantasy reverts to mythology, as we can see in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. It is primarily because of the concept of myth that I chose to base my story in fantasy. In myth we find many archetypes (universal symbols familiar to nearly everybody). Many have used myth and archetypes to explain much about our culture. Among them are Carl Gustave Jung and Joseph Campbell. I could also mention Sigmund Freud, but I'm not going to. Jung had the theory that myth and archetypes represent a "collective unconscious." This idea influenced me greatly when choosing fantasy as my genre. Much in the same way as myth, fantasy can contain many symbols and archetypes that are already familiar to a wide variety of people in that "collective unconscious."

Joseph Campbell talks extensively of a "hero's journey" which is a representation of the desire to excel that we all have inside of us. Generally it involves an ordinary person who goes on a journey and does extraordinary things, often making mistakes, constantly learning. There is often a princess to save, guarded by a dragon or other such monster. The "hero's journey" is far from original. It pops up all over ancient literature. We see it in The Odyssey, Beowulf, The Faerie Queen, etc. Even in modern times the hero's journey has not lost it's taste. A prime example of this is Star Wars which drew heavily on Campbell's ideas. This is why I have chosen the hero's journey as an essential element in my story, because it has a history of entertaining large amounts of people.

Many other archetypes exist in addition to Campbell's hero archetype. Symbolism can be found everywhere, especially in fantasy. We will discuss several of these symbols as the story develops. For right now, here are the basic elements I want in the story.

• It will be a fantasy genre, likely in a medieval time period.
• It will involve a hero on a hero's journey.
• There will be a "princess" to save.
• There will be a dragon or comparable challenge to overcome.
• I'm giving it the temporary title Ages of Myth in honor of its mythological beginnings.