Tip
One of the reasons that we can be endlessly creative with folk tales and folklore is that we can make new meaning out of old. As Angela Carter wrote, ‘I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the bottles explode.’
We can explode some wine bottles with a satisfying crick-crack-crunch by subverting, or defying, the reader’s expectations – something Carter was good at. One way to do this is to think of a trope, from folk tales or from folklore. We might look for an archetypal character (the foolish lad, the miller’s daughter), a particular type of trouble-maker (a goblin, a pixie), a fantastic beast (a selkie, a kelpie, a werewolf), a common belief (witches sail in egg shells or fly on broomsticks, flight feathers in pillows will stop you sleeping).
Once we’ve chosen our trope, consider what makes it familiar. What do we expect from it, know about it? What kind of role does it usually play, what kind of fate do we think it has?
For example:
The foolish lad will go off on a journey, and by continuing to be foolish, avoid disaster and achieve success. He is young, happy-go-lucky, hopelessly lacking in self-awareness, a figure of fun.
Witches’ broomsticks are the old-fashioned, twig besom kind. The witch can sit astride the broomstick to fly, probably to meet other witches in the middle of the night. It functions as a normal broom at home.
Then we can think about making new meaning. A few ways we can have fun with a trope are to:
Subvert it: the miller’s daughter is not meek and mild, but a bad-ass with self-defence skills and a healthy scepticism when it comes to talking foxes and robber bridegrooms
Extend/extrapolate to an extreme: the foolish lad makes lavishly stupid mistakes and yet quickly finds himself made president of the USA
Ask, how would this work if it were real: could a woman design a device using a broomstick that really would get her airborne? How many eggshells would it take to make a viable raft? What if I found a real goblin in the back garden, and brought him indoors?
Exercise
Choose an idea, belief, character, place, magical creature, or anything from folk tales or folklore that you think other readers would probably recognise. If you’re short of ideas, there are loads of folk texts here, arranged according to tropes: https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html
Pick one, and make a few notes about its usual function, what we think about it, expect it to do, its typical attributes and role in story or lore. What would other people expect to see, or happen, in a story that included this trope?
Then choose a way to alter it – subvert, or extend, or make it 100% real. You can try out a few variations, jotting down ideas until you get one that you like.
To turn this into a story, make a choice:
Is the story going to be one in which the reader discovers that this trope is not what they expected? The reader’s pleasure will be in being surprised by this discovery, having made assumptions that the trope would behave as it normally does.
OR
Is this strange and surprising aspect going to be established as the way things are, immediately? Then the reader’s pleasure is in watching how the rest of the world accommodates, or rejects, this trope. How will things go wrong?
This tip is from Zoe Gilbert, who teaches our online courses, Folk Tales in New Fiction and Summer Seminars: Fantastic Literature.