A couple of weeks ago I chatted a bit about where my ideas come from; I said they come from Life, and that's not a lie, as far as it goes. Last week, Mike the Grump accused me of talking about nothing but Life; he was also speaking truth -- I don't know how much technical gibber my audience wants, or even how much I'm willing to give. The more I think about it, the more it seems like work.
Well, here's an illustration of one story-making approach that's actually fun -- and don't spread this around, but if a story's not at least mostly fun to write, it won't be fun to read. Critics use the term "self-indulgent" to describe an author just writing on and on to please himself, rather than "serving the story." as though a good author does anything but please himself first.
When I was in college, I amused myself by taking two or three fairy tales and mashing them together; I may have gotten the idea from The Hobbit, if not I should have. In this way I had characters and situations I could play with, but already mutated enough that I wouldn't be tempted to just retell the original story in a sly or campy way.
For example, let's look at our characters: the Lost Princess, the Evil Queen, the Enchanted Mirror, the Huntsman, the Prince, the Dwarves; and we shouldn't forget cameos by the dead king and queen -- the hero's virtuous dead parents have a strong narrative pull; just ask Bruce Wayne. Many of these elements reoccur in other stories- Repunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Rumplestiltskin and others are Lost Princess tales; Beauty and the Beast has a magic mirror; there is an evil dwarf in Rumplestiltskin.
As I search for a hook for my particular story, I try to analyze the appeal of Snow White: it takes no great deductive gift to realize that the strongest character is the Evil Queen. She has all the good lines, the swell transformation scenes and initiates all the action. And she's pure evil. What if she were the main character entirely, with Snow White a mere pawn? It's tricky to have a hero who's completely evil; not impossible, but hard because the most interesting characters struggle between self-interest and the love of another. What if the Queen was Good and Snow White was Evil? That would certainly force us to write a different kind of story; still somehow the Good Stepmother struggling against her bad-seed step-daughter isn't exactly the story I find myself wanting to tell. In a way I want to tell a story that's about the actual struggles of step-families, yet framed in a medieval setting. Then what if the Queen is Good, Snow White is a dupe and the Dwarves are Evil? Then the story would be about the Queen's struggle to free Snow White from the evil little people. That has possibilities. Real possibilities. Maybe Prince Charming is Evil as well.
Of course, problems remain. If Snow White is to be, say, a spoiled, willful child-woman, easy to lure, she still has to be a bit sympathetic or no one will care if she's rescued; the Queen, if she keeps her magic powers, and that is a part of the character I like, has to be limited somehow and the Evil Dwarves have to be more formidable, or there's no contest. And since we're talking about a story where a young woman is taken and abused, is this going to be a children's story now, or one aimed at adults? If the latter, is it PG, PG-17, R, or X?
One way to supercharge your story is to fill in the details that have been left out. How does the King come to marry the Evil Queen, and how does this kingdom relate to the rest of the world? How does a convenient prince happen to be wandering loose through the forest? Here's where a dash of historical research comes in handy. Most of the motion and sociological change in the middle ages came from the crusades; thousands of men (and women) who would ordinarily not have moved thirty miles from their birth villages, ended up traveling thousands of miles and coming into contact with religions, cultures and philosophies that were utterly new and strange. The Christian, European point of view held that One Book and One Church had contained One Truth from the beginning of time; now thousands of good Christians suddenly confronted difference. Medieval society believed in a vertical hierarchy - God, Pope, King, Duke, Knight, peasant, wife, child. Anything which challenged this was not only blasphemous, and treasonous, but impossible.
Thus the rest of the world, which generally refused to follow these simple rules, became a constant source of fear and amazement to Christian Europe. Somehow, the story of Snow White could be tied into all this: the lord of some small, but strategically placed kingdom, has everything but an heir. His wife dies giving birth; then he is called away to a crusade for a couple of years. When he returns he has with him a beautiful Islamic slave-girl, who he bought or rescued or ... Something. I'm working on it.
Anyway, he falls in love with the slave-girl, marries her and his lonely heart begins to mend; but wild young Snowy, both spoiled and feral, is desperately jealous of this beautiful, young stepmother, who uses her "magicks" to cure disease and make the barren farmland fertile. Then the lord is called away on another crusade; after a year he is reported dead. Snowy blames her stepmother, however unfairly. She lives like a hermit in the deserted part of the palace.
As Snowy grows older and more beautiful, neighboring "princes" begin to flock around, hoping to annex the little kingdom through marriage, either through themselves or their sons. Snowy would love to escape the Queen’s guardianship through marriage, and she can’t see the insincerity of the nobles. The Queen has affairs with some of these suitors, thinking this will expose their greed and shallowness, but it only makes the girl more jealous and angry. To protect her, the Queen forces her to wear rags, and to act like a servant; this has the usual effect and soon Snowy has run off into the forest where there are three enchanted, daemonic bears and . . .
Or, wait - She finds not seven dwarves, but one, the evil dwarf Rumplestiltskin. You see, her real mother was the girl who had to spin straw into gold, and Snowy is the first-born the dwarf was promised. So when the Queen realizes the danger, she pursues the girl into the woods, and . . .
Oh, you’re still here? Sorry, this is getting pretty interesting. Maybe I can make the ‘dead’ queen Sleeping Beauty. After all, isn’t growing up learning to cope with the secrets and compromises our parents had to make? And maybe the huntsman is Robin Hood, and when . . . Well, anyway, I’m going to be here all afternoon - you know the way out, right? See you next week.
So when the huntsman finds Snow White, she has been pulled under a bridge by an ogre in a cave lined with goat bones . . .
