ON FAIRYTALES Claire Watts
Be they echoes of tales from long ago, retellings or twisted and fractured mash-ups, fairytales never lose their appeal. This issue, author Claire Watts talks about what fairytales mean to her — and the result of a self-imposed 500-word a day writing challenge.
Claire Watts
Fairytales, it seems to me, are the bare bones of stories
Fairytales, it seems to me, are the bare bones of stories. Forget all the Disney versions you’ve seen, all the modern retellings, and go back to the first experience of fairytales you remember. Is it the Ladybird books for you? Or a big volume of stories with illustrations that you had to stop and pore over? Maybe you were lucky enough to have a family member or teacher who told you fairytales rather than read them.
Ask yourself, who are the people in these stories? Where are they? When? What do they feel? How do they speak? Fairytales give us almost nothing. A miller had a daughter. They lived once in a far-off land. A king and queen were sad because they didn’t have a child. A wolf said, “All the better to eat you with, my dear.” Fairytales are all plot with puppet characters. Did you ever see those extraordinary Jan Pienkowski fairytale illustrations? The characters and features of the story are black silhouettes against bright backgrounds. That’s what fairytales seem like to me.
Why are fairytales like this? I wonder if it’s because of their origins as oral tales. Maybe when you tell stories aloud, getting into a character’s head or talking about their surroundings might make listeners lose the thread of the all-important plot. It’s like the way you recount the plot of a novel or a film:
- ‘So there’s a girl and she’s an orphan, and she goes to live in a big house with an older man so she can look after his child…’
- ‘This boy finds an alien in his garden shed and takes him home…’
- ‘There’s a ship’s captain and he’s obsessed with capturing this whale…’
Fairytales gave me a perfect hook to hang my 500 words a day on. I would write tiny morsels of fairytale detail – motives, thoughts, conversations, descriptions, before and after. I would poke into the gaps that fairytales leave, sometimes twisting a little from the standard tale, sometimes doing no more than bringing it into a sharper focus.
- What did the prince think about being expected to choose a bride at a ball?
- Why did the witch steal baby Rapunzel?
- What is a gingerbread house really like?
Snippets, by Claire Watts
I wrote these stories just for myself but other people liked them so I thought I would share them. The audience for Snippets isn’t obvious enough for traditional publishing. They’re not really children’s stories. They’re for people like me who love fairytales and thinking about the way stories are made. And so, I published a little volume of twenty-two of the stories myself. You can preview the first couple of stories of Snippets here. Or look at this fun animation of one of the stories my daughters made.
I’ve started a new Substack where I’m publishing Snippets regularly. You can find the first post here.
*Header image: Tita Berredo;
profile of Claire Watts: andrewperry.co.uk
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Instagram: @evangelinecluck
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