#riushka

I’m working on this thing where there’s a lot of backstory presented as apparently unconnected fairy tales. I’m figuring out when I should drop this or that bit (linked to each present situation somehow and in no chronological order), but I’m having trouble to make it flow. I don’t want it to be a ‘let’s stop now the narrative. Here reader, swallow this chunk of unrelated story before we go back’. My MCs are the ones telling the stories that were told to them by their grandparents, and they’re the ones that slowly start connecting them. So far I’ve come up with a few scenes in where they’re chatting and remember a story and just tell it because they’re children and bored and whatever it’s fun, or maybe something going on makes one of them remember and HAS to show the others how similar is to that other thing. There’s room for 'they’re sitting by the fire and is story time eat it’, but it happens so many times that I want to make sure it doesn’t look forced into the plot. The stories are something they go back to because they are bored, or scared, or just want to forget the situation they are living, or the reason why they ended up deep in that sh*t in the first place. If it helps, most of the plot develops while they travel around the forest. They’re on their own with the addition of a Thing that looks like their mother but isn’t.

The first thing that came to mind when I read this question was The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, in the way Tolkien fit songs and poetry into the novels [HERE], as a part of the way that the characters interacted and how they expressed themselves. Each of the different songs in the text has to do with a moment of high emotion, and/ or understanding the world, from the first sight of Rivendell, and the Elves’ greetings, to recounting the provenance of the One Ring. 

I think that you could do something similar with your fairy stories, in that the children, walking through this forest, are searching in themselves for something familiar that will allow them to deal with the problems they face in the present. You could fit in stories at moments of high emotion, when the children are grasping for ways to make sense of what’s happening.

For instance, you could have a character who tells stories when they’re frightened, to try and make themselves feel and seem calm. Or you could have someone who wants to tell funny stories and tries to turn them into jokes, to distract from what’s happening. Maybe when they’re camping someone has a nightmare and someone else tells a story to make them feel better.

Think about what each story does emotionally for the character telling it, think about why that character would feel the resonance of that story and choose to share it.

I find this a pretty interesting concept, and it makes me think of this quote from G. K Chesterton:

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Especially as the children are told these stories by their grandparents, who I’m guessing had at least some knowledge that the ‘fairy stories’ were more historical than the children know. There’s a sense of the grandparents arming the children with knowledge so that when the time comes they’ll be prepared, which could work very well.

I hope that helps!

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