Break all the rules!

Rebelling can make for powerful writing... from the LLL archive

Folk tales tend to break all the rules we are taught about how we should write fiction. And yet, for many of us, they continue to wield a strange power over our imaginations. All the elements of folk-tale style and structure signal to us that we are entering a dream-world, where magic can be real and enchantment is everywhere.

Once we understand how folk tales break the rules, we can use those techniques to create folk-tale feel in our own writing. This can be useful even when writing realist fiction, or memoir (it crops up in Samantha Harvey’s brilliant memoir, The Shapeless Unease, for example). It allows you to shift the tone and the expectations of the reader, and approach difficult, personal or elemental subjects from a new angle.

Show, don’t tell

We’re taught to show the reader, by dramatising a scene, describing dialogue, gesture, and setting. We save telling for when we need to jump over a less important bit, or speed up time. But folk tales are pretty abstract. They don’t bother with detailed descriptions of people, actions, conversations, places. They tell us that people or things are good, bad, beautiful or ugly, but they don’t show us. Any details are simple or symbolic.

Psychological depth

Characters in contemporary fiction should be psychologically realistic, nuanced, complex, with inner conflicts. If we give a character enough depth and complexity, they will start to feel like real people we can invest in. But characters in folk tales are flat, almost silhouettes. They’re lucky to get a name, but are usually reduced to an archetype, and their emotions come along one at a time: happiness, sadness, fear, anger. Folk tales give us no sense of psychological cause and effect; nor do they illuminate the decisions characters make.

Internal story logic

Life is stranger that fiction, and if you’ve ever tried to turn real life into a story, you will know that things need to make more sense in fiction than they do in the real world. The reader expects to be able to ask ‘why?’ and find the answer. Randomness makes readers unhappy. But in folk tales, things simply flow along, with ‘and then’ being enough to carry us from one event to the next. If we ask ‘why?’, there is rarely a sensible answer. Realistic cause and effect have no place; rather, things make sense on a subconscious level.

Internal rules, laws of nature

In a contemporary story set in the real world, if a woman metamorphoses into a fox, this will come as a surprise to her watching partner (see Sarah Hall’s story, ‘Mrs Fox’). Characters in full-fantasy stories might not be surprised by magic, but that is because they live in a magical world. But in a folk tale, an ordinary peasant girl who lives in an ordinary village will not be remotely surprised by an animal that speaks, a swan that turns into her brother, or a comb that transforms into a forest when flung to the ground. Magic is normalised, even when everything else obeys the laws of physics.

Exercise

We can give new fiction the feel of a folk tale by defying the usual rules and embracing those of the folk tale.

Think of a story you already know well – one of your own, or a book, movie, short story or even something from the news.

Beginning with ‘Once upon a time’, try to retell the actions of the story. Recast the main characters as archetypes. Skip their motivations and simplify their feelings. Take us from one action to the next without lingering over the settings, or creating scenes; simply tell us what happened, ‘and then…’. See how much realism you can strip out, whilst taking us to a folk-tale ending (either brutal or happy!).

To make a story feel even more like a folk tale, you can also deploy:

• The rule of three – things (wishes, helpers, obstacles, attempts, warnings, little pigs) come along in threes

• Any of a number of classic folk-tale opening and closing lines – look here for inspiration

• Natural landscapes (forests, mountains, lakes and seas) as places to encounter magic, adventure or enchantment, as opposed to the more settled domestic space (house, hut, castle)

Open for Booking at London Lit Lab:

We are looking forward to our final masterclass on autofiction with Susanna Crossman’s final masterclass on autofiction is tonight: Autofiction and breaking the rules, with Susanna Crossman,16^th July, 6-8pm.

You can still buy the Autofiction combination ticket for all three masterclasses at an overall discount, and catch up with the recordings. Just please drop us an email if you decide to do this - info@londonlitlab.co.uk

There are a few places left on Katie Watson’s masterclass: Writing Our Way Back - Masterclass in Therapeutic Writing, on 26th September, 3-5.30pm