It was getting stuck with a feature treatment the other day that made me realise I needed to be bringing more to it. I was happy with the general feel of the story, very happy with the ending, and happy that I’d devised an opening to it that set the whole story up nicely. Happy happy happy. Only, something was missing. And that something was a particular kind of depth that would enable me to piece together the elements of the story that I was having trouble figuring out. At which point one of the things I’ve learned to do is turn to mythology. Which is not something I have any special expertise in, so I sometimes ask friends who I believe may be able to help out. And that’s when someone came up with the realisation that the story I’m telling has its roots in the story of the Minotaur.

Now, what with myths being told and retold over the centuries, they tend to have several versions available, which can help you pick out what’s particularly relevant to your story, and what’s not so important. And one consistent element of the stories that resonated with me was the character of Ariadne, who gives the hero Theseus a ball of thread so that he can find his way through the labyrinth that the Minotaur lives in. Hmm. In my story, a psychological thriller, the Minotaur is a good way to think about the protagonist’s internal conflict rather than a real beast he has to confront. But the notion that a woman helps him deal with that conflict makes a lot of sense, and was already implicit in the story in the form of a character he meets when he’s at a low ebb. Expanding her role makes all kinds of sense, and for her to present him with a ball of thread works too. And I realised, that too was already present in the story I was working with. She doesn’t give him an actual ball of thread, but she leaves him with something seemingly whimsical that becomes a valuable clue at a later point in the story. Bingo.

Interesting that in looking into the legend, I realised that some of the key elements were already there in the story I was working on. Which if there are indeed only so many stories, is no great surprise. Personally, I don’t believe that there are just so many stories…but I do believe that there are particular patterns of interaction that are ripe for development as stories, and which the ancients got to first.

The other part of the Minotaur story that interests me is what happens later on, which is wonderfully tragic and human and messed up. On the way home, the ship Theseus travels in loses its white sails in a storm, and instead has its black ones raised when the ship comes in to dock. His dad, seeing the black sails, believes them to be a message that his son is dead, and leaps off a cliff, grief-stricken. Powerful stuff. And I’d like to find a way of weaving some of that, somehow, into the tale I’m telling, which has no ships, storms, or sails, but does feature people who, like all of us, misread messages with sometimes catastrophic consequences.