As Spencer McDaniel writes, The Hero's Journey may be a vox pop method of storytelling, but it's no #Monomyth:

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/

The #Monomyth theory is far too blurry to claim any historical provenance. That's why it's nonsense. It promises to be a theory of everything for literature, yet when stood against the historical record, it's no more a crack at making the Philosopher's Stone; a minority of clichés that, today, could be found on TV Tropes with a thousand non-exhaustive sub-articles. Interpreting stories with it involves more shifting goalposts to get them to fit than it's worth.

And yet, for it to be "thoroughly entrenched in high school English literature classes all over the English-speaking world," surely it's not all nonsense? Fantasy writer #BrandonSanderson, for example, cites it in this creative #writing lecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nalQSBJZV-k

It's more accurate to say that the Hero's Journey is a product of the last half-century, urged into relevance from the writers of Star Wars, who found the myth of the #monomyth to be, based on their own experiences, 'true enough.' The problem with this is that once you start judging literature only through what stories have in common, you grow cynical of the idea that literature builds upon itself.

As Rachael Lefler of Owlcation writes: "Why bother reading both the Aenid AND Watership Down if they're essentially the same book?"

https://owlcation.com/humanities/How-Monomyth-Theories-Get-It-Wrong-About-Fiction

If I wanted to write a story that Mum would read, following the Monomyth would be worse than useless. Lefler argues that literary connoisseurship is far more important to aspiring writers. If you want to write a detective story, there's no substitute for reading Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton. If you want to write a story that stands out, that breaks new ground, you have to know whose shoulders you're standing on first.

In the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2007 edition, the late #TerryPratchett argued we should take literary connoisseurship beyond our preferred genre:

> "There is a term that readers have been known to apply to fantasy that is sometimes an unquestioning echo of better work gone before, with a static society, conveniently ugly “bad” races, magic that works like electricity, and horses that work like cars..."

> "...It’s EFP, or Extruded Fantasy Product. It can be recognized by the fact that you can’t tell it apart from all the other EFP."

> "Do not write it, and try not to read it. Read widely outside the genre. Read about the Old West (a fantasy in itself) or Georgian London or how Nelson’s navy was victualled or the history of alchemy or clock making or the mail coach system. Read with the mind-set of a carpenter looking at trees."

It's not just about reading the classics. If you want to break ground with that no-nonsense detective story, you're gonna have to read - gasp - fantasy! Sci-fi! Romance! Check into Eddie the Non-Fiction Kid's library and check out with some real stories, capische? And if you know what's good for you, learn a little history. Keep it real.

No. That wasn't the first warning. I'd ignored that one.

Will Storr's *The Science of Storytelling* is an odd book. It's not on my postgrad's reading list. In fact, I was recommended this book by a Twitter post years ago. The premise seemed interesting enough, and I thought it relevant to tack on as extra material.