The Purpose of Fairy Tales

We are storytelling animals. We are raised in a nursery of fairy tales, and they teach us how stories work.

In our storytelling foundation class to help you come up with a big, bold story idea—The Big Idea—we take writers back to the first stories they loved, fairy tales, and have them dig there. We show you just how many famous writers of bestsellers did just that.

This magical course, most often described by our writers as “mind-blowing,” shows you how to combine your unique interests, passions, and love—your own experiences—with the bold gambits of the all-time bestsellers for complete story success.

Stories don’t need to be entirely original

Most writers think that what’s required is an original story. Well, yes and no.

What readers want, and what literary agents and publishers want, is familiarity with a twist.

For years, you may have wondered how other writers came up with their ideas. Now we know!

Our latest, greatest organizational monomyth—the cult of Jesus Christ—is failing in the fast-paced world where technology rules, though it is still at work in other places. For those of us with the multimedia device strapped to our foreheads, our reading content is broadly organized into the format of fast-moving stories via “fake news” and so on.

We are adrift without a myth, drowning in an absence of meaning in this, the Age of Impatience. In the pandemic, more and more writers—and readers—began turning to tales of fantasy. Our literary agency partners told us they began to receive more and more of these novels, and the appetite for them remains strong!

Big novels begin with small stories

The fairy tale is a story starter. Our writing coach Ella McLeod shows you exactly how, and why, those classic childhood tales can bring forth a book for today in this deep-dive blog on fairy-tale writing inspiration.

At The Novelry, we walk you through coming up with your idea, testing it, growing it, and then writing it—taking it all the way to a publishable manuscript with our Finished Novel Course. It’s our bestseller, which sees your finely developed work, under the care of our brilliant writing coaches, aiming straight for literary agencies. Just take a look at our published success stories and writing course reviews.

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Big stories have a consistent structure, and we see the formula which Tolkien called the “eucatastrophe” at work in a series like Game of Thrones and other heavy-hitting cinematic box sets. They remind us of our deepest communal aspiration that something cosmically healing will come from disaster.

Even in the dark, you can discern the shape of the monomyth that was first spelled out by Joseph Campbell. Find even a narrow well, drop a line and a lead down it, and you will find the big story again, always there, always shaping and organizing us.

It’s been this way since 3000 BC, when the Egyptian sage and god, Thoth (known by the Greeks as “Thrice Great Hermes”), first explained the notion of the “great mind,” the mind of all minds, the mind we share, the mind which is the God. He told us that the first thing God did after sorting light from dark was to spill the “word” or logos into the cosmos.

For the marvelous word-spinning mortal human being, the word was to the great mind what speech is to thought.

Fairy tales are hugely powerful

In the darkest times, fairy tales—fantasy stories—can have the greatest power.

Why, all of a sudden, so it seems, did highly political men and women, completely committed to furthering class struggle in Germany during the Weimar period, begin in 1920 to write and illustrate fairy tales and fables for children?
—Jack Zipes (the fairy godfather of fairy tales)

The good people of the Age of Impatience, especially during the pandemic, convened before the small screen to watch big box sets and see mythical creatures fly and heroes defend all that is just to the death.

Authors bring the power of their tales in the past to the service of present and future, the never-ending story of hope, the transaction between debasement and defeat and possibly victory.

Indeed, if one were to scan the works of the most famous German authors, from Goethe to Gunter Grass, one would find very few who had not written at least one fairy tale.
—Jack Zipes

Is using the fairy-tale form the hallmark of a great writer?

Most of the authors of our classic bestsellers of all time (Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, et al.) were close students of fairy tales and their form.

The fairy tale is the form “that sticks.” It packs a mighty moral punch.

Many of our well-known writers have written fairy tales. Oscar Wilde, Chekhov, Ford Madox Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Cunningham, Salman Rushdie to name just a few... Tolstoy wrote over 100 fairy tales for children.

Of his novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie said:

Like most fairy tales, it is about reality... The real dragon that causes evil keeps on hiding. But I’ll find him one day, and then I’ll fight it out with him.
—Salman Rushdie

The fairy story—in its long form, a novel in almost any genre—makes plain the relentless grinding duel between sustaining life and meaningful life. It shows how the idea of evil is, in itself, a sustaining delusion. Necessary because we need something to battle, and the battle is the meaning of life.

Evil, as Hannah Arendt surmised, is banal and commonplace and passive. But in our stories, we offer the consolation that it can be overcome.

Write a big bold story. Start with something small and mighty.

Begin with The Big Idea, then write your novel with the second step of our three-step program using The Big Write, producing and refining your work in the third step, The Big Edit. With us, you can write a lasting story that will be there when you’re gone.

We make it easy for you. We give you structure, guidance, and support every step of the way.

Come on over to The Novelry, where we warmly welcome beginners, witches, wizards, and small children currently lost in the woods of their writing.

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For more insights into literary techniques, coaching, and a supportive writing community, join us on a creative writing course at The Novelry—the world’s top-rated writing school.