“That’s why I have written a dystopian novel. I wanted to examine what is best about humanity and think about what would happen if we let that go, even if it is by accident. Although it may seem like I have written a novel that warns against technology, this is not entirely true. I embrace technology but we have to always keep it in check. We certainly don’t want to lose ourselves in making life a little easier.” – anonymous modern American writer

The above was written by a Facebook poster in a writing group I had joined. I like her reasoning for writing Dystopia though I think the volume of urban Dystopia is too much today and her views are too personal and not objective enough. The fact is this statement increasing shows many people, especially in the Western World, are venting or expressing some loss or resentment and feeling lost in the changing culture wars and conflict that consume them. When you write solely from your personal pain and desire for love and attention you create nothing original or unique in the writing world. That is my point…why not write an autobiography or fill an article with your pain?

It’s a very complicated world today and it’s causing tribal feelings in millions of Americans. But I think writing to express larger concerns about society or culture through your novel is a very traditional calling, yet adds nothing original. Expressing personal frustrations, longing for love, loneliness, love interests, divorce, hate, personal needs, romantic desire, or the search for fame, power struggles, sex, or violence…too often I think those are the underlying motivations for writers today.

I do think what’s missing from writing today in general is the seeking of something beyond one’s life and culture. And that comes from spirit and intellectual curiosity. Mythology has been my life-work in helping me understand the symbols of fairy tales and fantasy that lie beyond my life, my family, my career, my pain, my longing, and my reality.

Myth in fiction could help writers of Urban Dystopia transcend literary obsessions and hidden agendas and instead seek solutions that actually embrace broken Dystopian worlds and relationships as “part of the Jungian Self” that exists in us all. Doing so would allow such places to transcend the connection to our world and our reality and begin to tap into the darker Shadow Self world Campbell used to mention. There hides a much richer darker more sublime truth.

It’s in those dismal shadowed waters of the unconscious mind that the real fears of dystopia hide, where the dark Self that seeks to fight and to survive still hides. In this dark pool at the bottom of the soul lives an amazing instinct and wonder about the larger truths, only tapped into and seen from afar through the symbols, creatures, and events of our dreams and mythic lives rarely glimpsed in the roles we play in the modern world.

– the Author

Created Aug 3, 2017, 1:09 AM