Welcome to the order
In fabula veritas⸺Truth in fiction
Are you ready to regain your focus, improve your craft, and embark on a productive writing journey? Join us for a transformative literary experience as we explore the greatest gift to mankind⸺storytelling.
We are looking for storytellers that want to pursue beauty and truth through deliberate practice. You’ll learn craft but above all you will be exposed to the greatest stories ever told from the masters themselves.
If you’re ready to learn from the greatest instructors that have ever lived, then grab your quill, pen, pencil, typewriter, laptop, or bronze age writing instrument and join us in the scriptorium!
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Why join?
Venustas veritatem sequitur⸺Beauty follows truth.
We want to help writers put truth back into their prose and tell stories that reflect our human condition as our motto suggests⸺in fabula veritas!
We currently offer courses for novices. We don’t promise that you will become a published novelist or a world renown author, but what we can promise is that you’ll have the greatest instructors that have ever put pen to paper.
We are not here to give you a beat sheet and show you how to structure your novel or short story. Our focus is on encouraging storytellers to learn the craft by discovering our lost literary tradition.
We believe that great writing results from reading great works. There’s nothing wrong with contemporary works, but we want to focus on what has past the test of time by encouraging storytellers to read the great books!
You are my teacher, my authority;
you alone are the one from whom I took
the style whose loveliness has honored me.
⸺Dante, Inferno Trans. Anthony Esolen
Just as Dante sees Virgil as his teacher in Inferno, we too can find mentors in the great books. And what better mentors than the great authors themselves.
Our course for novice storytellers is comprised by examples of great works. The works we owe our literary tradition to. Like the monastic orders, we gather our literary inspiration from concept of ora et labora.
Mimetic Order doesn’t seek to copy but to inspire prose that is true and beautiful.
Meet your writing instructors
Hunc esse fructum legendi⸺These are the fruits of reading
These are just some of your instructors. Rest assured that you will be guided by the very best:
Dostoyevsky
The Brother’s Karamazov
Crime and Punishment
Shakespeare
Hamlet
King Lear
Dante
The Divine Comedy
The New Life
Homer
The Iliad
The Odyssey
The goal is not imitation but close appreciation that leads to emulation. Close readings that seek to appreciate our instructors’ prose and etch its greatness into our soul. Aristotle, in the Poetics said, that our first learning experience comes through imitation and we delight in it.
Think back to your first learning experiences. How many of them were the result of copying behavior? I bet many. At Mimetic Order, we believe that learning is something we discover through experience.
Eventually, you no longer needed their help. The skill was automated and you ahd made it yours. We want you to read and copy until you automate the structure of the stories and then generate your own based on your unique experience.
The greatest tool of a storyteller is not grammar, it’s not syntax, it’s not a poetic turn of phrase. Those are all great, but what makes a story great truth. That is what we learn from intentional copying.
Above all, then, imitation by itself is not enough⸺if only because it is the mark of a lazy talent to be content with what others have discovered.
⸺Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria
Critics will say that this is plagiarism but you’re not stealing what the greats have produced to pass it off as your own creation. You’re learning from them and producing your own unique take. You’re not Homer and no matter how much you try you can’t be for you can steal his words but you cannot steal his thoughts and perceptions.
Why don't they attempt the same thefts themselves? They would find that it is easier to steal Hercules' club than a line from Homer.
⸺Virgil, in Donatus, Vita Vergili
Ready to join?
Hunc esse fructum legendi⸺These are the fruits of reading
Telling great stories is one click away. If you’re still unsure download our first lesson on narration!
Lesson 1
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