Thinking prompt #17: MYTHS & LIES
Hi Everyone,
There’s an old joke regarding Cuban exiles that goes something like this:
If every exile who purported to have a deed to his ranch back on the island actually produced one, Cuba would be the size of Brazil …
How do lies, exaggerations, myths, and nostalgia distort memories? Family histories? Political ones?
YOUR PROMPT: What’s the biggest, most implicitly-consented-to lie in the world of your story? How do your characters arrange themselves around this lie? Who promulgates it most fervently? Who gets to confront it? Feel free to write this up, if it suits your work.
Let me know how this goes!
Abrazos,
Cristina
In my latest novel, Rocked in Time, set in the radical theater scene of the late 1960s and early ‘70s, the big lie was that we were all revolutionaries, equal in the struggle, when in fact, we, the men of the movement, hadn’t the foggiest idea about how, or slightest intention to relate to our sisters as equals.Rocked in time explores the first battles of second wave feminism and the reality of sexism and misogyny and male ‘revolutionary’ myopia. -- Charles Degelman
This is SUCH a great prompt! Thank you, Cristina! I’ve been missing an element for a project I’m starting, and this might be it. I couldn’t figure out WHY these two characters who rub each other the wrong way stay in each other’s orbit, and THIS prompt explores exactly why--they affirm each other's reality.
The way that our characters (and we, in reality) huddle around myth (and outright lies, at times) to reshape their world instead of doing the work to reshape themselves is often the catalyst for unexpected and irreconcilable change. And few things bring about dynamic, earth-shattering change (and CONFLICT) like the dissolution of a myth tied to a character's identity.
THANK YOU!