Welcome to my Collected Anthology of Fairy Tales.
This project originally started out as a writing exercise and was part of a writing course, I was taking part in online. The course began with the development and padding out of your character with back story, quirks and mannerisms. The next step in the process was to interview the character, asking and learning the nuances and depths of the character's personality, building their attitude, thought process and character voice. The final stage of the character development took us, the students, into the writing stage.
We were set a genre that we had to place our character into, developing, growing and building a cast of characters around the main character that complimented through either aiding or conflicting with the lead in your story theclass would develop as the exercise(s) progressed.
The character I created, was a character called 'Mr Wright'. With the setting given to me by the tutor - fairy tales - he became the 'Wright Little Tea Maker'. His profession being that of selling tea.
This came about through the experiences I was having at the time.
Living in China and being immersed in the culture, a key part of the Chinese psyche is tea. It is a big deal and there is a profession in China, of 'tea merchant' to serve the demand. They are treated in a similar way the West views wine merchants. They don't just sell teas, they also make and blend different infusions for the season, month, feeling or preference of the drinker. They will blend a new tea right before your eyes, based on questions such as 'What is your favourite flavour?', 'Preferred fruit?' or any other question that aids the tea maker to develop a tea that you will want to buy from that individual in the future. Additionally, he or she will be the only person that holds the specific blend of tea that you like and thus guaranteeing your return and future custom.
I did this and, as brilliant a salesman and woman that they are, they would always present me with my ordered tea (my specific mix was written out on my individual customer card) and also include another infusion or mix which they thought I might like to try. Included with thepparcel of tea, a little card explaining what it was and what it was called so that if you liked it, you could visit the shop and order that mix or even modify it to match more closely with your taste.
So this was part of the fabric and my daily life in China. A measure, if you will, of things in the environment around m, that I was living in, influencing my ideas and thoughts. To have a good discussion meant also having a good drink of tea.
This infusion of culture led to the culmination of this character which came out of a flash of inspiration that I must accredit to my wife, who is my 'tea maker and who makes it just right'. It was this very sentence that set my ideas sparking. the word 'right' was a flash of inspiration and I knew, through a friend back in the UK, that 'Wright' was also a family surname, so I now had a surname. It was from this small spark that inspiration began to work its magic and form the character.
With the character created, it was time to now place the character in our assigned genres allocated to each student by our online course tutor. My classmates received genres such as crime, thriller, children's book, adventure, horror and then it was my turn... I received 'fairy tale'. Which I protested at first, but was diligently persuaded that, actually, it was the easiest and also the most common to replicate. Just a plug and play process. Oh, how deceiving that was. I began my research. We had 6 weeks to research, write and deliver a 2,000-word piece.
So I went to the default tales of 'The Brothers Grim' and 'Hans Christien-Anderson'. All superbly crafted tales by masters who had plied their craft for a long time, and who were true masters at it. It was during this searching and reading that Hans Christien-Anderson offered me an olive branch or a helping hand if you will. I stumbled across an article about a discovery in a dusty old family home library near Anderson's old home town.
Link ... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20706230 [Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tale found 2012]
The article shared the story of the discovery of the tale 'The Tallow Candle' by local historian Esben Brage in the dense private archives of the Plum family. So I tracked this story down and read it.
You can read the story here ... https://www.hcandersen-homepage.dk/?page_id=46663[The Tallow Candle Story]
It was amazing. It was an early piece of work by one of the greats and it was rough, clunky and clearly still an experimental piece by Anderson. Not just that, I realised that I was very capable of producing a piece of work similar in quality to it. I realised that it was do-able, it was possible. It was not an unimaginable gap for a beginner to bridge from first steps to master-piece, but instead somewhere in the earlier to middling stages of learning the craft. It was possible to make something that could set me on a path to doing better work in the future. If Anderson had started somewhere then so could I. The lucky thing was, I had the cheat sheet as his example was now there to guide me.
So I set to work writing and drafting and re-drafting. I submitted my 2,000 word fairy tale on time and it was passable. Not great, but as my tutor and classmates soon came to say, had potential.
We completed the course and received feedback not just from the tutor but from classmates as well. I received overwhelming feedback about my story and how they wanted to know more. They wanted to find out more about the character and the story I had written. Not just that, but also that the supporting characters had caught their imagination as well. They wanted to read more. I had achieved my 'hook'.
So I set to work, and quickly my 2,000 word story grew to 4,000. Then I realised that I couldn't explore these characters in the scope of just this one story. The stories soon multiplied and became an anthology. In turn, new ideas were sparked and before I know it, I had compiled the collection I have for you here today.
So to wrap up this short expose to what became a 6 year-long writing project - and is still ongoing to refine and polish the tales - I have opened this anthology for you to read, review and help me, please, make these stories memorable and part of our world of storytelling.
I hope you enjoy and have fun on your adventures with the characters in these tales, I warn you, some are quite dark in places (as a nod to Brothers Grim). I'll see you on your return.
Chris
