Discuss: Fairy Tales and the Narrator.
So, I was writing a fairy tale today, hoping to get it published. I've had several ideas for fairy tales kicking around in my head and notebook, and thought I might as well give at least one a shot.
I discovered in the course of this process that I cannot write a fairy tale without an active narrator. Cannot. Period. I sat there for an hour trying to think of a way to open a story called 'Fire-Hart', or continue a story I'd already started called 'The Raven's Daughter and the Wood-King's Son', and guess what I came up with? Nothing. Then I thought of an idea, it slipped into a first-person narration, and boom! Instant story. It's a pretty good one, too, or will be once I work out a way of not making the ending too pointed.
I considered previous fairy tales I've written and realized that I always do the same. 'Miro and Renion', a fairy tale with gender-bending fun? Wouldn't finish without the singer asserting its truth, and then needed a parenthesis at the start to set it up. 'Blessing of the Beast', which I want to restart and maybe finish this time? First person strikes again. 'Memnon', a semi-Sleeping Beauty? Closer, but I still think of it as an oral story.
I thought about this for a while, and came to a conclusion: I write fairy tales differently than I write other stories. They're not written stories, exactly; they're transcribed oral myth. I don't write them, I just record someone talking.
I think it's part of having absorbed my fairy tales through that kind of medium, Lang fairy books and Tatterhood collections of female heroes. It's crept in to the way I perceive the genre. There's a style that I can't quite describe, but that creeps its way in. Distance, maybe, is the closest I can come.
Fairy tales do not happen here and now, and aren't supposed to. While other short stories try to drag the reader straight in, fairy tales keep the reader at a distance. You aren't Tatterhood; you're sitting and hearing her story.
It's a very specific genre to me, and part of what makes it so is this stylistic distance. If you try to make the reader feel like a part of the story, you can have all the spinning wheels you want, but it won't be a fairy tale.
Does anyone else feel this way about fairy tales, or am I the only one? How do you feel about fairy tales?
I discovered in the course of this process that I cannot write a fairy tale without an active narrator. Cannot. Period. I sat there for an hour trying to think of a way to open a story called 'Fire-Hart', or continue a story I'd already started called 'The Raven's Daughter and the Wood-King's Son', and guess what I came up with? Nothing. Then I thought of an idea, it slipped into a first-person narration, and boom! Instant story. It's a pretty good one, too, or will be once I work out a way of not making the ending too pointed.
I considered previous fairy tales I've written and realized that I always do the same. 'Miro and Renion', a fairy tale with gender-bending fun? Wouldn't finish without the singer asserting its truth, and then needed a parenthesis at the start to set it up. 'Blessing of the Beast', which I want to restart and maybe finish this time? First person strikes again. 'Memnon', a semi-Sleeping Beauty? Closer, but I still think of it as an oral story.
I thought about this for a while, and came to a conclusion: I write fairy tales differently than I write other stories. They're not written stories, exactly; they're transcribed oral myth. I don't write them, I just record someone talking.
I think it's part of having absorbed my fairy tales through that kind of medium, Lang fairy books and Tatterhood collections of female heroes. It's crept in to the way I perceive the genre. There's a style that I can't quite describe, but that creeps its way in. Distance, maybe, is the closest I can come.
Fairy tales do not happen here and now, and aren't supposed to. While other short stories try to drag the reader straight in, fairy tales keep the reader at a distance. You aren't Tatterhood; you're sitting and hearing her story.
It's a very specific genre to me, and part of what makes it so is this stylistic distance. If you try to make the reader feel like a part of the story, you can have all the spinning wheels you want, but it won't be a fairy tale.
Does anyone else feel this way about fairy tales, or am I the only one? How do you feel about fairy tales?