Absolutely. It sounds like you've got a very good instinct for how to write them, and the "soul" of fairy tales, which have a slightly different flavor than other forms of storytelling!
Fairy Tales are a very special form of mythology. They tend to recur all over the world (Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast appear in some form in almost every culture), they're primarily orally transmitted, and despite the fact that they pick up a trappings of the culture where they're "living", most of those trappings are very irrelevent to the story.
Fairy tales are heading on the way to dream images like the rolling field of oats in the sun, the strange amalgam animal made of several kinds of animals, the fish at the bottom of the well that make sense at a level of our imagination much deeper than the surface, ego, narrative, "let me tell you a story..." level. So trying to describe it through the eyes of a narrator, a witness, and bring it down to earth (or, maybe, up to earth) is like taking a Coyote myth and attempt to write it as fanfic, getting inside Coyote's head.
Also: "Once upon a time..." Fairy tales happen in that timeless time which isn't now, and isn't Long Ago during the time of our ancestors; it's in its own special un-time.
All of these things make fairy tales not so much personal as universal. You don't identify with the main character so much as sink into the pattern, the situation, the motifs, the decorations and moments of wonder, watch it as you'd watch a flower unfold.
Bah, I don't think I said that very well -- you said it better! I've done some studying in fairy tales lately from a Jungian perspective. His idea of archetypes is a really, really useful concept for studying myth, story, and other vehicles of creative imagination.
Fairy Tales are a very special form of mythology. They tend to recur all over the world (Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast appear in some form in almost every culture), they're primarily orally transmitted, and despite the fact that they pick up a trappings of the culture where they're "living", most of those trappings are very irrelevent to the story.
Fairy tales are heading on the way to dream images like the rolling field of oats in the sun, the strange amalgam animal made of several kinds of animals, the fish at the bottom of the well that make sense at a level of our imagination much deeper than the surface, ego, narrative, "let me tell you a story..." level. So trying to describe it through the eyes of a narrator, a witness, and bring it down to earth (or, maybe, up to earth) is like taking a Coyote myth and attempt to write it as fanfic, getting inside Coyote's head.
Also:
"Once upon a time..."
Fairy tales happen in that timeless time which isn't now, and isn't Long Ago during the time of our ancestors; it's in its own special un-time.
All of these things make fairy tales not so much personal as universal. You don't identify with the main character so much as sink into the pattern, the situation, the motifs, the decorations and moments of wonder, watch it as you'd watch a flower unfold.
Bah, I don't think I said that very well -- you said it better! I've done some studying in fairy tales lately from a Jungian perspective. His idea of archetypes is a really, really useful concept for studying myth, story, and other vehicles of creative imagination.
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