Member-only story
What Tolkien and CS Lewis can still teach us about creative work
We might work alone. But to thrive as writers — or as artists, entrepreneurs, side-hustlers–we also need community.
You need to find the others.
The people who on the same journey. Whatever you’re trying to achieve, you’ll do it better, faster, more courageously if you have companions on your journey.
For proof of this, read John Hendrix’s beautiful, genre-busting book The Mythmakers. It’s an innovative piece of non-fiction, written mainly in the comic-strip format of a graphic novel and mixing straight biography with more fanastical, magical strands that talk about stories, and why humans need them.
It’s a book about faith, and friendship.
It tells the true story of two British men, traumatised from their experiences in the trenches in World War 1. One was from Belfast in Northern Ireland. The other from Birmingham, the industrial heartland of middle England.
After the war, both ended up as academics in the university city of Oxford, where they became friends. They shared a love of Norse myth, and both were determined to create new myths and stories — a desperately unfashionable notion at…
