Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Fairytales on the Menu

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As I mentioned in a recent post, I’ve been having a lot of fun with fairytale retellings lately. It’s a genre I was never even really aware of until Rooglewood Press’s Five Glass Slippers competition gave me the inspiration to write Corral Nocturne. Writing for that contest and reading the winning entries was such fun, I’ve long toyed with the idea of writing more fairytale-based stories at some point. More recently, I’ve been inspired by Suzannah Rowntree’s wonderfully creative takes on both well-known and lesser-known fairytales. So the long and the short of it is, I have a couple more of my own in various stages of pre-production (to borrow a filmmaker’s term). Lost Lake House is a retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses set in the Roaring ’20s. And The Mountain of the Wolf, an idea that basically came out of nowhere and smacked me between the eyes this month, is a Western tale of outlaws and revenge based on Little Red Riding Hood. I’m planning to work on one or both of these over this autumn.

Along the way, I’ve been considering the question of why fairytale retellings are such fun to read and especially to write. Perhaps the appeal lies in starting with an existing story structure—for writers like myself, anyway, who find crafting a cohesive plot one of our biggest challenges! The few main plot points are laid out for you, almost like a template, leaving you free to play with the more colorful and subjective elements of character and setting to your heart’s content.

Looking for a metaphor, I thought at first of comparing it to a recipe, but then thought better of it: you don’t have quite so much freedom to shuffle the ingredients of a recipe. It’s more like a menu. On a menu you have a list of categories or components—appetizer, soup, meat, vegetable, side dish, dessert—and it’s up to you to fill in the blank on each and come up with as many different combinations you can think of, using a specified number of each of those pieces.

So, to take the most familiar example, the list of components for a Cinderella story looks something like this:

Key components (main dish and entrees, shall we say)

  • 1 heroine in unhappy or restricted circumstances (Cinderella)
  • 1 unkind relative/figure of authority responsible for heroine’s unhappy state (Wicked Stepmother)
  • 1 hero, deemed inaccessible to heroine by his station in life or some other circumstance (The Prince)
  • 1 important event at which hero and heroine are brought together, with a crucial moment or disaster coming at midnight (The Ball)
  • 1 benefactor who makes it possible for heroine to attend said event (Fairy Godmother)
  • 1 lost shoe that proves vital to the heroine’s fortunes (The Glass Slipper)

Minor components, optional (appetizers and desserts, if you will)

  • 2 other relatives/persons in heroine’s life who assist in making her unhappy; also frequently rivals for hero’s attention (Wicked Stepsisters)
  • Parent or parents of hero, preferably in position of authority and/or grandeur (King and possibly Queen)
  • Variable number of small friends or allies of heroine (mice, dogs, horses, etc.)

Putting it that way, you see how innumerable variations can be crafted on this one basic plot! How many difficult situations can we think of for our heroine to be trapped in (we writers are much too good at inflicting trouble on our characters), how many different eccentric or unlikely benefactors can we invent—how many creative uses can we find for a stray shoe? (Has anyone done a version where the shoe gets flung at someone?) Outlining my second and third, I’ve realized that my own particular angle on retellings—unintentional but consistent—is their real-world setting. They’re straight historical fiction, without magical creatures or imaginary kingdoms involved, but still paralleling the characters and plot of the original fairytale. Coming up with those real-world equivalents is a fun challenge.

Do you enjoy fairytale retellings? If so, what do you think makes them fun to read and write?

A Fine Romance

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When I set out to write a retelling of Cinderella, I had a couple of points in mind from the first where I wanted to do things a bit differently. To begin with, I knew I wanted to give my Prince Charming character a definite personality and initiative of his own. The Prince seems to be rather a nonentity in most traditional tellings of the tale—we’re never really given any good reason for Cinderella to fall in love with him, besides the fact that he’s a prince, and we’re told (but not often shown) that he’s charming. Second, I wanted my hero and heroine to meet early in the story, so they had time to develop a friendship before the climactic “ball” sequence. In most versions of the story, Cinderella meets the prince for the first time at the ball, which means invoking the old standby, love-at-first-sight (at least on his side; she could have loved him from afar, I suppose).

I wanted to avoid love-at-first-sight for the simple reason that it has been done so often, besides being a bit less believable. It’s not the most irritating romantic cliché for me (that award would go to the misunderstanding that drags on for half a book when it could be cleared up by someone speaking one sentence), but I think it is one of the most over-used. I’m sure it does happen sometimes in the real world, but there it’s probably in the minority. Fiction seems to reverse that statistic. Oh, it’s definitely useful in terms of plot; I can see that—it raises the stakes and kicks the story into a higher gear right off the bat, and in “these days of rush and hurry” when we have to capture and hog-tie the reader’s interest as soon as possible, I’ve no doubt it looks attractive to authors. But common sense keeps me from becoming too enchanted with it when I write. Attraction or interest at first sight, definitely—that can give your plot a nudge and hint to the reader that there’ll be something doing later on. But in nine cases out of ten, you’ve got to give these characters some time to at least get acquainted before they can start considering whether this person is someone with whom they could spend the rest of their life. To me, that has a more authentic feeling.

Another cliché I’ve observed is the brand of forbidden romance with an Unsympathetic Parent obstructing the course of true love. As with love-at-first-sight, one can see its advantages plot-wise: instant conflict. But I think it’s also been overdone to the point of saturation. Now, that’s not saying I’m in favor of arranged marriages or parents exerting an unhealthy amount of control over adult children’s lives; and I know there’s enough bad parents in the world to provide material for a hundred books. But that’s just the point: they already have. I think fiction could use a healthy dash of families where children and parents respect one another’s judgment and share each other’s ideals enough that they’re not likely to come into conflict over something as important as the children’s romantic choices.

Again, that’s not saying I’d never use this plot, any more than I’ve sworn off gunfights in Westerns. As a matter of fact I have used it more than once. But I try hard to keep it from being just a clichéd wail of “They don’t understand!” In “The Ranch Next Door,” for instance, I made a point of having my heroine say she knows her parents would never object to her sweetheart on a personal level had things been different; it’s their unreasoning feud with his family getting in the way of their judgment. In another yet-to-be-published story I took it tongue-in-cheek for humorous effect.

“But Lainey”—Gerald gestured helplessly—“you don’t understand, girl. Why, I always figured for you to marry some nice feller who’s got himself set up proper in the world, and—and have the right kind of house, with one of them newfangled cookstoves, and glass in the winders, and them—doilies on the rockin’-chairs in the parlor.” 

“Pa, we’ll come to all that later. Bob wants to raise horses for the army; he—”

“Yeah, an’ Johnny Wagner wants to be a cattle king!”  

“I don’t want to marry Johnny Wagner!” 

“You’re doggone right you don’t!” barked Gerald. 

They glared at each other for a minute, slightly sidetracked.

~ “The Mustanger’s Bride”

I even have a sketch of an outline for a novel where a parent’s disapproval drives a good half of the plot. But my general rule of thumb is, if there’s going to be a parent/child conflict over a romance, there’d better be a darn good reason for it, at least in the minds of the characters. If a parent is misguided, they ought to at least believe they’re in the right, not just take a random unreasonable dislike to a potential son-in-law to complicate the story. Because that would pretty much make them a cardboard character and invalidate them as a source of wisdom on any other subject.

Do you find any of these plots overdone in your reading experience? Can you think of any examples of books with a refreshingly different or original take on the romance plot?

Soundtrack for a Story: Corral Nocturne

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After a hectic spring, I decided I didn’t feel like taking on a summer writing challenge, like Camp NaNoWriMo or Actually Finishing Something [in] July, as much fun as they would have been in other circumstances. I’m just not up to pressure, especially self-pressure (which is one of my weaknesses anyway). Anyway, I spent a little while waffling between three different projects, and I’ve finally decided to re-edit Corral Nocturne, my last year’s project from Actually Finishing Something. I’d had vague ideas about editing it for a while. But reading Five Glass Slippers (which was excellent, by the way; my review here) gave me some much clearer ideas about what it was lacking and how I might improve it.

There’s definitely a distinct musical mood to this story, so once again I have a small playlist that I listen to when I need to get in the mood for working on it. I thought it’d be fun to share it the way I did for The Summer Country. You’ll notice there’s much more of a thematic connection between music and story this time. One piece, obviously, provided both mood and a title. The first and last tunes are featured in the story itself; “Cathy’s Theme” is the only one that really has no connection beyond being gorgeously romantic: