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.

👆 That was irony, by the way.

Evopsych (a.k.a 'Darwinian psychology,' 'human sociobiology' and 'A Story of Science-Telling') presents itself as something you can't just casually unpick or disregard, like swiping past a video on social media you almost certainly know is full of #bullshit. It's a bundle of hypotheses about human cognition and behaviour that you can tell to your friends, family, and passersby on the street, and find them nodding in vague agreement. It sounds… truthy.

On the other hand, if you've heard anything about evopsych before, I'm 99% sure it's not because of the actual ideas it posits ("we are products of evolution" isn't a bad premise on the surface), but a certain *audience* those ideas attract. They're the sort of folk who claim that natural selection alone can prove we are genetically wired (read: destined) to seek out criminality, hierarchy, war, or greed; believe that, and they can make you believe much worse.

Not unlike the #Monomyth, starting with the TL;DR of Darwin's theories is more open-ended than you'd think, and this means it lends itself to being fertilizer for shithead ideologues to make their means to an end palatable. Not all evopsych enthusiasts see themselves as bedfellows with eugenicists, nor successors to the phrenologists before them, but if you *are* for #eugenics, then evopsych is the perfect smokescreen, and you might as well call yourself one to confuse everyone else.*

The author seems keen to promote evopsych not as a third wheel to #neuroscience and #anthropology*, but as the main act (see next post):

> Evolutionary theory tells us our purpose is to survive and reproduce. These are complex aims, not least reproduction, which, for humans, means manipulating what potential mates think of us. Convincing a member of the opposite sex that we’re a desirable mate is a challenge that requires a deep understanding of social concepts such as attraction, status, reputation and rituals of courting. Ultimately, then, we could say the mission of the brain is this: control.
- pp. 16-17

As in, his sources rooted in evopsych are in proximity to those in neuroscience and anthropology, but the former takes significant precedence in his points over the latter.

For example: This article from the July 16th 1993 edition of the Daily Mail, a UK newspaper hawkish for far-right policy and pretends its journalistic standards reflect "what everybody's thinking:"

https://archive.is/86YSW

The headline reads "hope", and the bottom line is, "It could soon be possible to predict whether a baby will be gay and give the mother the option of an abortion." I don't think I'm reading too deep into this by saying this sounds a lot like, "Wahey, let's exterminate the gays!" Please elaborate what the problem is with having a child that might turn out to be gay. I'd love to know.