7 Day Story Writing Challenges: A Brief Guide to Writing Literary Fairy Tales

September 16, 2022 Globe Soup

This guide is all about literary fairy tales. What they are, tips for writing them, and a list of literary fairy stories you can read online for free. We also discuss the difficulties, limitations, and pitfalls of writing in this genre. This guide is a must-read for anyone assigned literary fairy tales in a 7 Day Story Writing Challenge, or for anyone wanting to explore new or unfamiliar literary genres!

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What are Literary Fairy Tales?

OK, time to come clean. We invented the term ‘literary fairy tales’ just for the 7 Day Story Writing Challenges. Whenever we’ve asked our members to suggest new genres for the challenges, fairy tales have always been a popular. And we’ve always been slightly against it. This is because fairy tales are tales, not stories. What’s the difference between a tale and a story? Well, tales usually have flat characters, never round. (If you haven’t heard of flat and round characters, check out this article.) It’s perfectly fine for a story to have flat characters and round characters, but in fairy tales all the characters are usually flat. Fairy tales are also generally told at an emotional distance, meaning there’s very little in the way of sensory details, moments of showing, or other literary techniques used to put the reader into the story. Finally, fairy tales deal in moral absolutes. The good princess, the wicked witch, the fairy godmother, the ugly stepsisters. Let’s just say that fairy tales tend to have a simplified view of human nature! The reason we’ve been hesitant to add fairy tales to the challenges is that we know that a story told at an emotional distance, that has a simplified view of human nature, including only flat characters, as well as a lot of telling and not enough showing… well let’s just say that that story would be at a disadvantage when judged against the others. This is why we’ve come up with the term ‘literary fairy tales’, which we will now define.

For the purposes of our 7 Day Story Writing Challenges, we’re defining literary fairy tales as a story which either retells a classic fairy tale in a more literary style or uses some of the characters or tropes from fairy tales to create a completely new, more literary kind of fairy tale story. This can be achieved by creating round characters, adding moral ambiguity, addressing complex themes, putting the reading into the story with the use of sensory detail, limiting exposition, and focusing more on showing, rather than telling.

Difficulties, Limitations and Pitfalls of This Genre

The difficult thing about this genre will be combing the classic fairy tale elements with the literary techniques. But we don’t think it’s that difficult. We know you guys can do it!

Top Tips for This Genre

We think the first thing to do is to decide whether you want to retell a classic fairy tale or write your own. Once you know the plot of your story, it’s probably time to think about the themes and the characters. How are you going to make sure your characters aren’t flat? Besides the actual theme of the challenge, what other ideas will your story explore? Classic fairy tales tend to focus on the themes of morality, mercy, generosity versus selfishness, virtue, kindness, good versus evil, kissing unconscious women without their permission… These themes are not inherently simple and can easily be explored in a more complex, ambiguous way. (Except the last one, which seems pretty straightforward to us!)

You do need to add sensory detail, use showing instead of telling (most of the time, not always) and put your reader into the story. But these are all things you need to be doing in all your stories, anyway. They are also things can can be left until after the first draft.