Wherein the reader gets lost in ill-defined woods and loses the will to care
THE BLATHERING
You know this one: “Sleeping Beauty,” or in the Blue Fairy Book, “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.” Just in case you missed it or have forgotten the story, I’ll paraphrase and throw in some comments for free.
King and queen desperately want child, can’t have one, try everything but nothing brings them a child. Then they have a daughter. [Couldn’t we have skipped the whole intro? “There was born to the King and Queen a lovely daughter.”]
K&Q throw big party, invite all the fairies they know (seven), not because they like fairies but because they want blingy fairy gifts. [Is there anyone in the kingdom, including fairies, who can afford to give the royals fancy gifts? Okay, maybe the magical kind of gifts are something the royals can’t give themselves, and that would be worth the trouble, but still….]
Eighth fairy shows up [Check the census. Duh.], miffed at being excluded [Well, yeah.], dooms baby to die of spindle prick. [Builds tension, assuming we understand the death will occur in the future. Builds mystery—why spindle prick? Why not poisoned apple?]
One good fairy mitigates the curse so that baby will only sleep for a hundred years. [Is a hundred years significantly different than dead? Why not have her sleep for eight hours a night for the duration of her life?]
Years pass, princess encounters spindle, falls into deep sleep. Good fairy puts everyone and everything in the kingdom to sleep so princess won’t be alone when she wakes. [Okaaaay. Again, why not just have her sleep for a shorter time?]
Century passes. Prince breaks into castle, wakes princess [this isn’t the version where princess gets pregnant while sleeping], marries her, but never takes her home to meet the parents. [That’s an entirely different plot that we aren’t going to follow here.]
THE POINT
This summary and my snarky remarks went on longer than I expected, so I’ll cut to the chase now.
There’s way too many unanswered questions and underdeveloped characters and unnecessary information. What I really want to know is
- Why didn’t anyone tell the princess about this, so she could avoid spindles? And then it would have been nice if she’d actively participated in saving herself.
- What’s the story behind the deadly spindle? Who did it belong to? Why does it kill?
- Why is one fairy evil and petty? How’d she get that way? Do all these fairies know each other? Do they regularly counteract each other’s spells?
And more than anything else, I want to know
- Which one of these stories is the plot and which is/are sub-plot/s?
I get it. You start writing the piece and it wanders off here and there. Then you follow a few random paths, and pretty soon it’s all a tangled mess. Then you hit a wall. At least, that’s how it happened to me when I got to the middle of one of the Jesus Creek books and could not for the life of me figure out what came next. Weeks of writer’s block nearly did me in, and when I finally figured out the problem (I was writing the wrong character’s story), I had to ditch half a book and start from scratch.
THE TAKEAWAY
Sometimes when a piece goes wide, you just need to zero in on one story, one character, one point of attention. Before you invest a lot of time and creative energy into writing, you could audition your characters; let them speak, tell their stories in their own way, and then decide the most important story to tell.
THE FOLLOW-UP
Just for fun, let’s try this as a prompt:
Choose ONE of the characters from “The Sleeping Beauty” (any version) and write this same story from that character’s point of view.
Let me know how that goes for you. I’m curious to learn whether you needed all the same elements to tell your better story, or left out some/most/all of them. I’d love to read what you come up with, too, if you’re willing to share.
TWO USEFUL AND REASSURING THINGS
How to Stay Focused When the World Is Burning
Peace Economy Writing Workshop : “Let’s get together to workshop our writing in a supportive environment: poems, short stories, songs and novel chapters (up to 1,000 words). The workshop will focus on the peace economy: works that speak to a culture of empathy, solidarity and connectedness, and resist a culture of violence and war.”
