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Originally Posted by gmw
I won't bother to explain why, but I happened to be researching a bit about Joseph Campbell and "A Hero's Journey" - specifically the book where he introduced the idea: "The Hero with a Thousand Faces". In the Wikipedia article for the book I found the following quote from Neil Gaiman:
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I think I got about half way through The Hero with a Thousand Faces and found myself thinking if this is true—I don't want to know. I really would rather not know this stuff. I’d rather do it because it's true and because I accidentally wind up creating something that falls into this pattern than be told what the pattern is.
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I totally get that point of view. For an artist hoping to come up with creative and original ideas, the thought that you are, even subconsciously, only following a pattern because someone explicitly put the idea in your head, would be disturbing.
On the other hand, I could also make a case for understanding the archetypes (?) that Campbell described and then choosing to use them for effect, or knowingly go against them. Sort of like the tenet of needing to know the rules before you break them. Also, taking Gaiman's idea one step further, wouldn't it be better if he had never read any books or stories in his life?
Why copy other people's ideas of story and structure....? Why stand on the shoulders of giants when you can reinvent every wheel, make all the same mistakes and figure out from scratch all that took humanity centuries to learn....