Writers notes: A fairy tale, not a hero's journey

To kill a little darling. Or not.

I realise I’ve reached a point with this book where the front-loaded momentum (of the first 10 or so chapters of this Book Serialisation) is popping out “bits” that I’m feeling forced to publish before I really know where they should be placed.

I normally write a book much like I cook. I start with what I have. I throw ingredients on a page (or in a pot), I stir, I adjust heat. I add some different flavours, layering hesitantly. I might have to turn everything off and go next door and ask for some soy sauce. I might abort mission, freeze portions, and repurpose the gruel in a few months (adding cheese and frozen peas); I’m able to place the “popped out bits” (the parts of my creation that weren’t fitting earlier, but now have a role) back in well before the meal is finished.

To bring it back to the writing process, when I write a book, I have to move things around a lot, laying printed pages on the floor and cutting bits and moving the chunk to a different chapter. Popped out bits from the first few chapters might sit in a pile to the side. A few weeks later I might later find a home for them.

This massaging never stops. For the duration of my writing I pulse back and forth between being in the weeds with commas and phrases, and panning right back and seeing it all as, yes, a complex system of looping ideas that interconnect and have a forward surge that I try to herd (from on high) to an expansive, life-affirming landing spot.

(Right now in my to-do list I have a note: “Pull back. Revisit USPs”.)

But doing a serialisation is linear. I start. I keep going. And it’s hard to anticipate a popped out bit. I’ve decided to get around this limitation by posting the popped out bits as they occur to me and assuming permission from all of you to move them around later.

Today’s bit, I feel, could sit with the Moloch chapter, tying into the cooperation thread.¹

But, I’m not sure. Perhaps I’ll cut and paste it to run later in the section (TK) where I start let rip with mindsets for the future. Or I might just kill the darling². We’ll see…

---

We’re in a fairy tale, not a hero’s journey

During the pandemic the stunningly adroit writer Rebecca Solnit read fairy tales online to fans. 

In a contrasting digital universe, a particular breed of “bro with a podcast” doubled down on hero’s journey motifs, sprinkled with Stoic appropriations. And ice baths. These self-professed heroes did a lot of ice baths.

Solnit has made the point elsewhere in her writing that hero’s journeys, as per the structure set out by Joseph Campbell, are “stories in which exceptionally powerful, usually male figures defend and enlarge their power (and in which the power is often the power to harm that we call violence).”

Fairy tales are also hero’s journeys, of course.  The protagonist goes out into the world, faces a series of ordeals, and returns home to tell the moral story. But in fairy tales the characters are mostly kids or women. They don’t have superior powers and tend to start out 50 yards back from the starting line, usually poor or marginalised (Cinderella), locked up or isolated (Rumpelstiltskin), undersized (Thumbelina and Peter Pan) or neglected (Hansel and Gretel). Their ordeal is overwhelmingly unfair and cruel. And so, to survive - to bring the journey home for the reader - these little undervalued characters don’t conquer or slay things. Instead, they must form alliances with other underdogs – invariably old women with fairy-godmother vibes, small animals, elves and other natural world friends.

💪 So, heroic journeys teach us to be strong and all-powerful.

🧚‍♀️ Fairy tales teach us to cooperate, be kind, innovate, listen, trust, and to rewrite the story in tough times. The also console everyday humans that they are no Robinson Crusoe - other vulnerable, small, scared beings have been plunged into hard, uncertain times before, too. They confirm that hardship and cooperation are part of life.

Today, we are in the fairy tale, not the bro’y hero’s journey. Lone ranger strength won’t be enough to bring this story home.

*

I also want to point out here that fairy tales were created during crises - global pandemics, famines and displacement. And they had harsh endings that provided moral, guiding principles that enabled the reader or listener to make sense of their own difficult predicament and loss in the real world.

I think it’s telling that the original versions of most fairy tales featured incredibly gruesome endings that, over the years, were replaced with oddly sanitised, Disney-fied versions. I have recollections of a mid-twentieth century version of Hansel and Gretal that my Grandad read to me, where the grandmother in the story is a cannibalistic witch who intends to eat Hansel (after fattening him up on sugar); at the end Gretal saves her brother by shoving Grandma’s head in the oven. Over the years, this turned into a far tamer tale in which the kids were kicked out of home by an evil stepmum (Dad was not complicit), or in some versions they simply got lost, instead of being abandoned by their parents (per the OG).

*

Solnit writes about how when kids are in the middle of a tale, in the suspenseful bit, they’re busting to know the end. They want the adults to read another page so they can know what happens, even when they suspect things will end gruesomely. We, too, want the adults in this situation to get out of the ice bath and tell us what happens next, to show cooperation can work, to demonstrate how the magic can happen and to tell the true ending, especially if the true ending is hard.

Love your thoughts and questions, as always,

Sarah xx

1. And before the part 2 of the chapter.

2. An editing term where the writer must leave a beloved part of their book out of the final version because it doesn’t quite work.