Fairy Tales Influence My Writing

I grew up on fairy tales. I was told stories, poems, shown movies and sung lullabies. Fairy tales have been a big part of my life so far, and I hope that they will continue in this way. Fairy tales come in different forms. Some are nursery rhymes, others are ballads, and still others are scary stories that make children – and some adults for that matter – quiver in fear. As a child I was brought up on the good kind of fairy tales, the ones that despite having a villain, the hero always won. The fairy tales that had musicals and happy, picturesque scenes of animation. I was brought up on Disney movies. As I grew, though, the movies became books and words, and some of them belonged to me. Writing a fairy tale is so much harder than simply watching as the plot played out on the screen. The movies changed to Shakespearean plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Winter’s Tale. Those fairy tales worked their way into my dreams and into my stories.
There are three types of fairy tales that influenced my writing, and they came in different forms as well. They came in movies, plays and simple storybooks. Different people created them, and they all gave me different reasons to like fairy tales and appreciate them to their core. Disney, Shakespeare and the Grimm’s brothers created different forms of fairy tales and I’ve read and watched many of them. They all contained good and bad people, and at the core of each and every one was a sense of happiness, even though some of them were utterly tragic and disheartening.
Disney created stories from stories. They made movies of stories that were already told, already known by many. They made movies based on books about villains, heroes, lions, tigers, bears, oh my! They contained lessons, ...

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... me in with their horror and surprise. To put the same into my own stories was always a difficulty because that was not the type of person I was. I wasn’t the type of author to kill off random characters in a novel simply for the sake of a great plot thickener or to startle my readers. As I read more though, I did take into mind some parts of the fairy tales. I took for my own the darkness that the characters acted under, as well as the evil that some of the characters fed in themselves. That made my characters deeper and maybe not better understood, but maybe just better in general.
There are many chapters in one novel, and within those chapters there are many, many words that create the story. Just as there are levels of a story, so are there levels of character development. Fairy tales have taught me those different levels and have shown me how to perfect them.