Analyze how a modern work of fiction draws on themes, patterns of events, or character types from myths, traditional stories, or religious works such as the Bible, including describing how the material is rendered new.

Unless an author is super old, chances are that he or she lifted parts of that story from stories that came before it, even if it was unintentional—no one just sits down and writes a novel without having read a whole bunch of others. That's what this standard is trying to get students to understand, because today's authors were influenced by older authors, and the older authors were influenced by even older authors, and so on and so on, until we reach the original stories (from the Greeks or the Bible or whatever). For example, the plot of Luke in the original Star Wars trilogy follows something called the hero's journey, which is basically a series of events that the characters of most mythical stories go through.