Ms Alexandra Kostoulas
Thursday 12 January 2023
Stories, just like all writing, have a structure that organizes and categorizes the work. In journalism, this happens in the form of the inverted pyramid structure. In expository writing, the thesis statement is the organizing principle of the work. In creative writing (like fiction and memoir) it’s the throughline and character arc.
As storytellers, we think and envision our literary analysis of a work in a different way than scholars do. Instead of critical analysis, we are engaging with the craft of storytelling.
As creative writing artists, our goal is the creation and craft of new work.
One way to envision new work is to borrow plot structures from myths that are already there.
There’s something archetypal to storytelling. Stories are ancient and as human beings we like to hear the same stories told over and over again in different ways.
This workshop analyses what we can use from the structure of mythology and how to incorporate mythology and archetypal storytelling structures into modern day myth.
We will explore as creatives where to work from existing story structures, societal myths and such, and also where to break from them in order to create new and compelling work that turns these ideas on their head.
