Ever Notice How Bizarre Fairy Tales Are? Lessons In Originality From The Classics

Writing about love is not easy. We have our own experiences or our childhood to draw on. And fairy tales have infused themselves into who we are, even after we're all grown up. But what can we learn from these stories in our writing?

At first glance, not much. They are the epitome of archetypes, right? How can we possibly get something fresh from 400 year old classics?

A lot. Consider this, if we're tempted to write about our own love stories, what are some of the usual ingredients?

- Mutual friends

- Restaurants

- Movie theaters 

- Merging your furniture 

Yawn. 

But fairy tales are bizarre, if you really pay attention to them. Take yourself out of the cultural fish bowl that taught you to expect these stories and follow me into the weird world of our childhood fairy tales.

Snow White:

 These are the ingredients for that story (without factoring in magic):

•  Homicidal step parents with low self esteem
•  Little people
•  Attempted murder, by fruit
•  A stranger groping a coma patient in the woods 

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not interested in bashing the story (though it's an easy target). What I'm saying is, look at how freakin' weird it is! And yet it's a classic. Why? Because it's so freakin' weird.

Other fairy tales have an odd collection of common features:

• Marrying a man she literally just met (Something that 90's sitcom Dharma & Greg worked into a hit!)
• Men kissing unconscious girls they don't know. . . and it's the antidote to comas??
• Killer step mothers! (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White. . .)
• The story cuts off as soon as they get hitched
• Children who run away from home and break into peoples houses (Snow White, Goldy Locks, Hansel & Gretel)

These are far from the only weird features in our classic stories. But it's a start. Now how do you utilize these quirky factors to improve your own work? Here are the lessons:

1. Be WEIRDER!
•  Take it up a notch and stop being so damn normal. And I'm not talking to the fantasy writers, I'm talking to writers of the magic-free manuscripts. It needs to be new. Weird is new.
2. Be TABOO!
• Don't just play with taboos, laugh in their faces and show them off. Raised eyebrows are page turning eye brows.
3. Take it and RUN!
• Take these stories and twist them, turn them, reinvent them! Take the basic elements of Hansel and Gretel and put it in Central Park today and BAM you have a super creepy thriller/horror story. Or pick up where sleeping beauty left off, but watch their marriage deteriorate into a messy divorce. It can be as a short story, a creativity exercise, or a whole MS. 

SO you tell me, what could you do with these stories? Which one do you think is just off the wall?