Leave a comment

Comments 6

auronlu July 26 2006, 05:01:25 UTC
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, ( ... )

Reply


sakuracorr July 26 2006, 13:58:42 UTC
The only fairy tales I can write are those twisted modern takes where Repunzel's tower is symbolic and the prince is her repressive husband (but I really liked that story).

Reply


stormflare July 26 2006, 14:23:59 UTC
hmm... I agree with you.

Also, when I write fairytales they seem to get long and twisted unless you use an oral rythm instead of a written one. (No, this doesn't mean I insert like in every other word, even if I accidentally do that in speech more and more now).

Saying "how do [I] feel about fairytales?" is a far to general question, so I'll leave you with this:

It always angered me how cinderella had to dress up beautifully for the prince to fall in love with her, while belle loved the beast regardless of looks. I guess men are more shallow...

Then again, I'm perfectly aware of similar tales where the genders are reversed, so... yeah.

Reply

ex_butterfl246 July 26 2006, 17:12:32 UTC
similar tales where the genders are reversed? I can't think of a beauty-and-the-beast type (fairy tale length) story where the woman is the beast. I must be missing something, so can you point me a direction?

Reply

stormflare July 28 2006, 05:58:53 UTC
hm... that may take a while... since... I can't for the life of me remember which book it was in. But I'll look around for you.

Reply


aerinth July 27 2006, 04:16:39 UTC
I agree, fairy tales are an oral thing, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't draw you in. Since most of what I've read is for children, they are a collection of 'this happened and then that and then the next thing' and don't include anything else. I think Fairy tales could do with a bit more magic and create an image in your mind.

Reply


Leave a comment

Up