Fairy Tales as Story Outlines
Author: Jody Wallace
Original Publication Date in Love Notes: June 2002

Have you ever read a book and thought, "Why didn't the author try this?" or "If I were writing that, I'd change this and thus to make it better." While you can't revise another author's book and call it your own without getting immeasurable heckling and a lawsuit for plagiarism, there are indeed some basic plots which writers return to with great success. In the particular arena of romantic fiction, fairy tales often provide the framework for fascinating and original storylines — even if "Cinderella" has been retold ten thousand times.

Linda Jones, Victoria Alexander, Colleen Shannon, Geralyn Dawson, Claire Cross (a.k.a. Claire Delacroix) and Debbie Macomber are among the countless romance and mainstream authors who have taken a fairy tale and turned it into a unique romance novel. Publishers, too, have promoted books of this nature with several series, including: Harlequin Temptation's "Lovers and Legends", Love Spell's "A Faerie Tale", Tor Books' "Fairy Tale Series" and Bantam's "Once Upon a Time Romances." While not all romantic stories, Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow coedited a fantastic series of reconsidered fairy tale anthologies [i.e. Black Heart, Ivory Bones (March 2000), Silver Birch, Blood Moon (March 1999), Black Swan, White Raven (June 1997), Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears (December 1996), Black Thorn, White Rose (October 1995), and Snow White, Blood Red (April 1995)].

So what's the appeal? Part of it is the fact that many of us have fond memories of fairy tales from our youthful readings (or readings to youths), and part is the fact that the ethics and morality of the tales themselves are deeply entrenched in our society. However, the part that I want to emphasize here is the fact that having your plot — and possibly theme — outlined for you by the fairy tale can be extremely liberating. Your job is to personalize and expand the fairy tale, creating a fresh story instead of inventing an entirely new story from scratch.

For example, let's consider the Grimm tale "Rumplestiltskin". The basic premise: the main character's father bragged to the king that his daughter could spin straw into gold, and the king — our not so heroic hero — insisted upon seeing this miracle. The daughter, of course, could do no such thing and had to rely on the skills of a sly little man who appeared out of nowhere. The little man demanded the girl's first born as reward (as sly little men often do), and the girl, whose other choice was to be put to death by the king for her failure, agreed. And so on.

(http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/044.txt is the full text.)

This outline contains the seeds for many fine romance novels: the innocent lover is forced to deceive the other and hence postpone the sensible happily ever after. Sometimes only one lover has a big secret and sometimes both, but there is always something, be it internal or external, keeping the main characters apart and the book going for 50,000 to 150,000 words. Yet how will this once upon a time transform in your re-imagining? This is where the fun part starts.

First, choose a fairy tale on which to base your novel. Tried and true plots like "Cinderella", "Sleeping Beauty", "Snow White" and "The Ugly Duckling" might appeal to you, and you also might enjoy exploring the thousands of lesser known tales out there found in: the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, the Arabian Nights, and many others. Let's stick with "Rumplestiltskin" as a starting point for our plot outline.

You will need to decide how true to the fairy tale and fairy tale setting you wish to remain. Do you want to do as Robin McKinley does in Beauty and tell the story with full-fledged fairy tale flavor? Or do you want to thoroughly modernize the tale like Mary Alice Kruesi did in Second Star to the Right? You could even choose a science fiction or futuristic backdrop like Joan D. Vinge's The Snow Queen. Since I edit the Science Fiction Romance newsletter on the side, let's go with near-futuristic earth, a world where environmental erosion and pollution have caused some pretty nasty diseases in the populace.

A final portion of the transformation is character/event similarity, or lack thereof. Do you want to twist the genders in the story like Cinderfella by Linda Jones or change out the roles of any of your characters? For our story, let's keep the main character female but switch out the heroes — our Rumplestiltskin shall be the lover of our heroine and the greedy king the villain.

Now what could the greedy king have been forcing the heroine to do or suffer the consequences? Perhaps the heroine's father/boss/coworker has boasted — or accidentally let it slip — to the villain that this heroine can cure a certain disease or give a person immunity to damage from the environment. The villain, who has the requisite hots for the heroine, is a slimy moneylender/rival businessman/shady government official with the power to ruin the heroine's company/family member/life if she doesn't produce this scientific marvel, yet she cannot, not without the help of that handsome rogue geneticist, Dr. Rumplestiltskin.

During this meeting of great scientific minds, there is also a meeting of great scientific bodies, and a miraculously healthy child results, or perhaps the genetic discovery represents the child that Rumplestiltskin, the heroine and the villain all wish to possess. Our heroine and Rumplestiltskin are kept apart by their past rivalry, suspicious natures and machinations of the villain. The possibilities are endless as well as exciting, and just about any fairy tale can provide a similar springboard.

As a writer, I have found that having an "assigned" starting point exercises your imagination in a different fashion and produces some amazing results. As a reader, there is great appeal in seeing what each author does with the stories I already know and love. Below are some hopefully inspiring links to get you started investigating the many fairy tales and fairy tale romances already in existence as well as some insightful essays about the impact of fairy tales on our culture.

For more information:

Terri Windling's Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts Web site: http://www.endicott-studio.com/ is concerned with "contemporary art and literature rooted in folklore and myth" and features art, essays, poetry, fiction and more.

National Geographic's nifty interactive Web site: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/grimm/ contains the text of 12 of the Grimm Brothers' tales, some with audio files.

Another site http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/ contains a more comprehensive electronic listing of tales by the Grimm Brothers but, alas, no cool audio files.

Heidi Anne Heiner's extensive site: http://members.aol.com/surlalune/frytales/index.htm contains annotated fairy tales, historical backgrounds, similarities between various tales, bibliographies and other tidbits.

At http://www.dimensional.com/~boardman/skye/mainbook.html you can find a great deal of romance and other novels based on fairy tales (including the series mentioned in the above text).

http://hca.gilead.org.il/ contains a repository of tales by Hans Christian Anderson

The Web site http://www.arabiannights.org/ features a thorough collection of stories from the Electronic Literature Foundation's Arabian Nights in two translations.

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