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Author
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Comment
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Valkith
Registered User
(2/17/04 1:57 pm)
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what genre?
What genre would you classify a story, that is based upon Fairy Tale characters, not aimed at children, or Young Adults?
I want to say Fantasy, but I was wondering if there was a more specific genre, when dealing with Fairy Tales.
Thanks
Val
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AliceB
Registered User
(2/17/04 3:57 pm)
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Re: what genre?
Must it be classified?
Alice
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Valkith
Registered User
(2/17/04 4:27 pm)
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Re: what genre?
It would be, as I understand it, helpful.
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cordsher
Registered User
(2/17/04 4:36 pm)
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Genres
Retold fairy tales for adults used to be interstitial--i.e., falling between genres, unclassifiable, experimental, rare. They are still between genres, in the strictest sense of the term. But there are enough of them out there (thanks to Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow's series, among other things) that they're starting to become a genre on their own. They're part of the impulse to mythic fiction, I think: fiction that's based on old tales and legends that have lost much of their relevance to daily life in their concrete details (wolves, woods, a static, peasant society, nature gods and spirits,
kings and queens, princes and princesses, not to mention godmothers) but not in their deep significance.
If you want to know more about retold fairy tales specifically and mythic art generally, go to www.endicott-studio.com.
Delia Sherman
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Valkith
Registered User
(2/17/04 4:39 pm)
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Re: Genres
My thanks.
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Veronica
Schanoes
Registered User
(2/17/04 10:21 pm)
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Re: what genre?
I think that there's a lot of overlap, though, with other genres, as well as a lot of dissimilarities w/in the category of retold fairy tales. For example, I would put Margaret Atwood's "Bluebeard's Egg" square into the domestic realism genre, but Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" into far less easily classfiable sythesis of the gothic, horror, erotica, even though both are revisions of Bluebeard. I've read revisions that have, to my mind, the style and conventions of genre fantasy, Anne Sexton's revisions are poetry, others I can't categorize at all. I don't think I'm comfortable putting them all in one genre because of their subject matter, though I recognize that subject matter is often one of *the* determining characteristics of genre (i.e. detective novels).
What do you think, Delia?
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cordsher
Registered User
(2/18/04 11:01 am)
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Re: what genre?
You are, of course, absolutely right, Veronica. Fairy tales are the clay from which story is, and a writer can cast it in any mold that fits her needs. I myself tend to structure everything I write as if it were a fairy tale (there are so many to choose from), because I'm dire at thinking up plots and "impossible tasks," "making the princess cry," and "the rule of three" give me a way of stringing my incidents together so that they make emotional sense, anyway. Sometimes there's magic in what I write. Sometimes it's straight realistic history. Sometimes it's straight fantasy. It depends on what I'm trying to do.
Delia
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janeyolen
Registered User
(2/19/04 5:28 am)
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Re: what genre?
Delia--well said. Though I got my best editorial advice from an editor who asked me why my Shaker novel, THE GIFT OF SARAH BARKER, had everything squeezed into a three day period. Seems I was trying to impose a fairy tale structure on what was NOT that kind of book. "Relax, give it room, and the reader will follow you," she told me.
So sometimes (but not often) my novels go other than in and out of faerie!
Jane
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wrightales
Registered User
(2/20/04 9:55 am)
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Re: what genre?
If you think categorizing retold fairy tales is difficult, try explaining original fairy tales intended for adults. You will be met with blank stares--if you're lucky.
I have never fully understood this idea that there are a finite number of fairy tales. You can play with them, expand on them, or transmute them, but you cannot create an entirely original one. There are very, very few original fairy tales written with an adult audience in mind (as opposed to stories with "adult content" or those who include a sly wink to adults reading aloud to children.) Those that are available to the general public are almost invariably in collections by well-established authors. One of the few exceptions I can think of is The Tale of the Undiscovered Island (or something close to that) by Saramago.
I can hear the outraged clacking of keys already, but I know from personal experience as a bookseller searching for such books and as an author who writes original fairy tales intended for adults that they are woefully rare. I suppose I should try and define the term "fairy tales for adults" as I use it so here goes:
Short, complete (as opposed to a vignette or a chapter from a longer work) with an element of magic, a protagonist with a quest who must overcome obstacles. A story that has some inner relevance to adult lives without harboring a moral. What it is NOT is cute, sweet, or silly.
Okay, I have thrown down the gauntlet. Let the melee begin.
Lisa---wrightales.com
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Richard
Parks
Registered User
(2/20/04 3:39 pm)
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Re: what genre?
I sub-titled my first collection "Fairy Tales For Grownups" (nor was I being ironic) so I'll admit to having written a few. I'll have to take issue with the notion that such fairy tales don't have a moral. Or rather, I think any such story, to actually qualify as a fairy tale, must have a _point_, and that's something that most fairy tales seem to share, whether intended for children or adults. Whether we call it a moral in the sense of a hammeringly obvious lesson or just a worldview given silent expression solely through the unfolding of the story itself, I think it has to be there.
http://dm.net/~richard-parks |
Valkith
Registered User
(2/20/04 4:06 pm)
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Re: what genre?
Don't most stories have some sort of moral to them?
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wrightales
Registered User
(2/21/04 7:45 am)
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Re: what genre?
By "a moral" I meant an overt hammeringly obvious point. I agree that all good stories must have a point or be thought-provoking in such a way that the reader will find their own point.
And how can I get a copy of your fairy tales for adults? I would love to read them.
Lisa
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Heidi
Anne Heiner
ezOP
(2/21/04 9:09 am)
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Re: what genre?
Copies of Richard's book are available on Amazon.com at:
www.amazon.com/exec/obido...lalufairyt
Heidi
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Richard
Parks
Registered User
(2/21/04 7:22 pm)
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The Ogre's Wife
Thanks, Heidi. Though I thought I'd better point out that only about a third of the stories in the book actually fit that definition if we get strict about it. "The Ogre's Wife," "Golden Bell, Seven, and the Marquis of Zeng," "A Place to Begin," "Doing Time in the Wild Hunt," "The Beauty of Things Unseen," and "My Lord Teaser" being the main ones.
In a broader sense, though, I consider all the stories in the book fairy tales for grownups.
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Jess
Unregistered User
(2/21/04 9:15 pm)
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About the others
Richard, et. al.,
I would define most of the others in "The Ogre's Wife" as "ghost stories". I have enjoyed them all. Kudos again, Richard.
I have often wondered where to attempt to have my non-magical, realist versions of fairy tales (short stories) published. They are always modeled off of familiar fairy tales, but would only appear so to the initiated reader. So far, I have been sitting on them. This is, of course, consistent with the issue this thread raises. What exactly is this genre?
Jess
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Terri
Windling
Registered User
(2/22/04 10:14 am)
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Re: About the others
Jess, when I see work of that type in print, it's always seeded into mainstream collections (by writers like Sara Maitland or Eilis Ni Dhuibhne), or in journals (The Paris Review, The North American Review, Story, etc.) -- where readers may or may not notice the fairy tale allusions. Judging by my years of reading for The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, there's no specific venue I know of that's specifically looking for realist fairy tale fiction, although it does appear from time to time in various mainstream journals, magazines and story collections -- generally in the form of stories that still have an impact whether the reader recognizes the fairy tale theme or not.
Delia and Veronica: can there be such a thing as an "interstitial genre"? I realize that sounds like a contradiction in terms, but I tend to think that the "genre" of modern fairy tale fiction qualifies for such a designation -- because unlike recognized commercial genres such as fantasy, historicals, mainstream fiction, etc., a reader seeking out literary fairy tale retellings must cross many genre boundaries since it's published all over the damn place: as fantasy, as YA, as historicals, as mainstream fiction, as feminist fiction, as queer fiction, as ethnic fiction, even as autobiography (for instance, Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother, published in its first edition as a literary novel and in its second edition as a Korean-American memoir). Writers working with fairy tale themes often borrow from more than one of these categories (which makes their work genuinely interstial, to my way of thinking) -- and if you're a writer with established literary credentials, like A.S. Byatt, you can borrow with abandon without worrying what genre the finished work is going to fit inside of. But younger writers struggling to find a market often find themselves either slanting their work towards a single genre (usually fantasy or YA) in order to get published, or they are left with the conundrum that Jess is facing: "Now where the heck do I place this?"
Edited by: Terri Windling at: 2/22/04 10:23 am
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Jess
Unregistered User
(2/22/04 1:33 pm)
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Thanks, Terri
Terri,
Your comments are helpful and enlightening. They confirm what I have often thought about fairy tales. They do cross-over, to borrow a term of art from music, many "markets" and many genre. I love it when I am reading something and I recognize its fairy tale skeleton even when others may not see it at all.
OT: Thanks for calling me a "young" writer as I just passed
my 40th couple of months ago and am feeling a little silly now and
again trying to start a whole new career.
Jess
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wrightales
Registered User
(2/23/04 8:23 am)
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Re: Thanks, Terri
Heidi, Richard,
Thanks for the info on the Ogre's Wife I will order it today for myself and for stock at the bookstore.
Terri, you do seem to confirm my feelings about the difficulties of this non-genre. I wonder if anyone else out there has taken my route of handbinding (as opposed to self-publishing or web-publishing) their stories. It is not as absurd an idea as it may seem. I have sold some four hundred handbound books in the last 7 years. It is not a good way to make money, although I make enough to keep the IRS from declaring it a hobby, but it is a good way to get your stories out there without a publisher. If anyone is interested, I would be happy to help them get started.
And Jess, 40 looks younger every year!
Lisa
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Veronica
Schanoes
Registered User
(2/23/04 10:28 pm)
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Interstitial genres
I don't know--that's a good point about the reader who searches out revised fairy tales has to cross genre lines. But then I think about my ongoing passion for books about the history of New York City, which takes me from novels to histories to encyclopedias to oral histories to old maps, etc. I wonder if such classifications are less interstitial in the sense of being not one thing or the other, but simply represent an alternate method of categorization that "we" as a society chose not to take--one by topic/content, in which there would be a Revised Fairy Tale section and a New York City section and a Baseball section and whatever. I know that some bookstores have sections like this, but I rarely see fiction in them; the New York City section has histories of the triangle shirtwaist factory fire but not Doctorow's *The Waterworks*.
On the other hand, there certainly are genres which are classified according to content, so why not Revised Fairy Tales? But if we make it a genre, can it then be interstitial? And then I'm back at the beginning of my circuitous thoughts...
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JoanneMerriam
Registered User
(2/26/04 12:57 pm)
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Re: Interstitial genres
wrighttales, what is the difference between handbinding and self-publishing?
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wrightales
Registered User
(2/27/04 9:31 am)
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Re: Interstitial genres
Joanne,
I guess the biggest difference between self-publishing and handbinding is the intended audience. Self-published books are intended for general distribution; that is, the author is trying to get them into as many bookstores or other venues as possible. Unfortunately nearly all self-published books look self-published (including my own A World Apart published through xlibris.com.) which means that interest must be generated through active self-promotion. The power of a great cover can not be over-emphasized. So the lack of an eyecatching cover becomes another hurtle the self-published must overcome. Not everyone has the energy and/or inclination to publicize their own work effectively.
Handbinding is a way to create a small number (anywhere from tens to hundreds) of beautiful books that attract potential readers with the binding itself. The book becomes attractive as an object as well as a vehicle for storytelling. Handbinding is intrinsically interesting to many people especially librarians and journalists. Done carefully, the binding becomes a doorway to a special experience. I think of it as the "ooh" factor. People who buy one tend to come back for more. It is not terribly profitable, but it is extremely rewarding and you can be certain that your books will be not be lightly discarded.
thanks,
wrightales (one t)
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