By now you might’ve noticed that I have a thing for fairytales. Actually, it isn’t just fairytales. It’s myths, legends, fairytales, and fables – and I love them all. How much, do you ask? So much that I once spent a week when I was in high school making a genealogical chart for the Greek gods. So much that I took a course in college on the fairytale (me and almost the entire football team – they were taking it for the “easy” grade.) So much that when I went to write my very first book I had to include a fairytale.

That book – The Raven Prince – has a continuing fairytale that begins each chapter. The fairytale is one I wrote myself, but you’ll probably find that it seems familiar. That’s because it’s partially based on the myth of Psyche and Eros (or Cupid). Now the main story in TRP is about an arrogant earl (what other kind is there?) and a poor widow who decides to defy convention by applying for the job of secretary to the earl. On the surface, the fairytale and the book’s main story would seem to have nothing in common – and yet if you look beneath the surface they do have similarities. Both stories have lovers that disguise themselves from their partner. Both stories have heroines who must find a way to heal a hurt in the hero in order to make true love work. There are other, perhaps subtler similarities, but I’ll leave those for you to discover.

In my second book, The Leopard Prince, I took a slightly different approach. In TLP the fairytale becomes part of the main story as the heroine tells the story to the hero over the course of the book. The fairytale is based on one by Howard Pyle which he included in his book, The Wonder Clock. Pyle’s fairytale is about a faithful servant who serves a cowardly king. I loved this story as a child! Not only does it turn fairytale conventions upside down – the servant ends up with the beautiful princess – but in Pyle’s beautifully illustrated book the servant has the most handsome classical profile which I spend quite a lot of time examining as a pre-adolescent. I liked putting the fairytale directly in the main story in TLP because as it is told, the biases of both George (the heroine) and Harry (the hero) are revealed. Remember that George is telling a story about a hero servant to Harry, who is her servant.

I used the same idea in The Serpent Prince (September 2007) only this time the hero, Simon, is telling the fairytale to the heroine, Lucy. Since Simon is such a clever man (or so he thinks,) he’s pretty much making up the story as he goes along. This fairytale is a Cinderella-type story with a shape-shifting magician who, of course, is not the hero – at least in Simon’s version. Lucy ends up having very different ideas, much to Simon’s confusion – and delight.

Fairytales are spyholes into a culture’s collective unconsciousness. They reveal what we dream about and what we fear deep in the dark of night. They follow patterns and arcs that are so worn with time that they’re almost burned into our psyche. Ask a child to tell you a story and you’ll find that she’ll probably start following a fairytale pattern without thinking. Once upon a time – the magician or trickster luring the innocent into another world – trials that come in threes – the magical object obtainedthe –  return to the ordinary world – and they lived happily ever after…

I don’t know which came first, the fairytale or our innate human way of telling a story, but I’m convinced that they are intrinsically linked.