Hey! Here is chimeriquement, one of the hosts of Once Upon A Time VN Jam, and today, I just wanted to share a bit about fairy tale writing.
Most of us, I think… don’t really write fairy tales, so we might be lost in how to do so. Well, this little note is here to bring some relevant elements to help you (or at least I hope)! Of course, remember that you don’t really have to follow it stricto sensu, or at all, or that you can play with these rules to make your own thing (without spoilers, my own entry is about explaining what leads to the first step of a fairy tale, so…).
Okay, let’s get started!!!
In general, you can structure a fairy tale in five major steps, which are as follow
- initial situation
- twist
- episodes
- solution
- final situation
So, let’s define these different terms and see how they apply to writing a fairy tale!
The initial situation is quite the explicit expression: characters live their daily lives, as they’ve always known… But then, this initial situation gets twisted: you need to make it tremble, to disrupt it for the story to be necessary. So, we see here one of the major points of a fairy tale: the initial situation is broken and we want to bring it back. Then, trying to solve the problem brought by the twist, the characters live several episodes, at the end of which they find the solution to the twist. The final situation is the one the characters are in after having applied the solution (and often contains the morality).
For example, Snow White’s tale could be structured like this:
- initial situation: Snow White, due to her dead mother’s wish, is a beautiful young lady with skin white as snow, lips red as blood and hair dark as ebony. Her father, before his own death, then married a vain woman, only caring about her beauty, moreso she regularly asks her magic mirror who’s the fairest of all. The mirror has always told the Evil Queen she was the fairest.
- twist: One day, the mirror answers instead that Snow White is the fairest of all.
- episodes: The queen asks her huntsman to murder Snow-White, but the man can’t bring himself to do so. Snow-White finds a shelter in a cottage owned by dwarfs. The Queen, when she learns that Snow-White is still alive, decides to take the matter in her own hands: she first tries to make her suffocate with a corset, then tries to poison her with a toxic comb, and finally makes her take a bite of a poisoned apple. Snow-White falls into eternal sleep, her glass coffin guarded by her friends the dwarfs.
- solution: A prince passing by sees her and asks the dwarfs to take her to his castle. During the transportation, one of the carriers stumbles on a stump and Snow-White spits out the toxic apple bite, finally breaking free from her curse.
- final situation: She marries the prince, invites her step-mother to the wedding and forces her to dance in red-firing shoes and the evil queen dies.
Now, let’s do it with The Little Red Riding Hood:
- initial situation: A little girl is asked by her mother to deliver a basket full of treats to her grandmother.
- twist: The little girl meets a wolf in the woods and tells him where her grandmother lives.
- episodes: The wolf arrives at the granny’s house faster, using a scheme to distract the little red riding hood, eats the grandmother and disguises as her. The little girl arrives later, goes into the wolf’s bed, believing it is her grandmother, and gets eaten too.
- solution: A hunter passing by kills the wolf, freeing the little girl and her grandmother from the wolf’s stomach.
- final situation: They are all saved and the little girl has learnt not to be distracted by strangers.
And that’s it! Of course, such a structure is meant to be toyed or played with, but for those who haven’t given much thought about their project yet, I hope it can help!
Hope you live happily ever after!