Pushing Your Writing, Pushing Your Mind

Remember The Querulous Squirrel’s 100-stories-in-100-days challenge? Ambitious, wot? Supremely well executed, eh?

Okay, now start with a similar premise:

• Write a story a day for an entire month.
• Saturdays and Sundays included. Holidays, too.
• No limit on word count. Just write a complete story each day.

Simple to say, hard to execute, right? Just as The Squirrel’s must have been.

So then add another huge level of complication: invent your own genre, in which you will write every one of your month’s worth of stories.

I’ll pause to let that sink in: your own genre…

That’s what Marta Pelrine-Bacon, friend o’RAMH and proprietor of the writing in the water blog, has been up to since May 1. Every story in her collection, called The Fairy Tale Asylum (what a name!), does not simply retell, update, or pay homage to a fairy tale. Each is a story… well, inspired by a fairy tale or other children’s story. A completely new story. Not quite a fantasy, not really a fable… metaphorically an inmate (as the title implies) in an asylum full of mad stories.

Now, I’ve had some experience with the idea of reworking a familiar tale from the collective unconscious. As I talked about back in February, Seems to Fit recasts the Arthur-Round Table-Grail legends, transports them in time and place to late twentieth-century Pennsylvania. It’s difficult to do this — for me — without trying too hard and/or too clumsily. I want my old guys to be looking for something, yes, but I am damned if I am going to use the word “quest” in the book — not even once. None of the characters drives a Dodge Charger. Like that.

What Marta’s up to is, to my way of thinking, an order of magnitude more difficult: she’s reaching into a given tale in the canon, plucking out some signal detail or two, and building around it a completely different story… a completely different story which nonetheless still feels weirdly “true” to the original.

(And, need I repeat: she’s doing this every day for a whole month.)

Take a look for yourself. Here’s the opening of “The Fear of Apples” (a story which more or less unhinged me on first reading; it takes off from “Snow White”):

Lily had to remember not to let her daughter see the apples. Whenever Miranda saw an apple, she began to scream. Even a picture of an apple brought tears. It made the grocery store near impossible. Alphabet books were difficult. So many of them started off with A is for apple.

Once Lily carefully cut an apple into cubes. She pushed the skin and core deep into the trash. The few cool whitish cubes set on a blue plate next to cubes of cheese. Miranda had skipped into the kitchen and screamed.

It took weeks for Miranda to stop accusing her mother of trying to poison her. All white food became suspect. Apples on television made Miranda cringe, and eventually the girl stopped watching television all together…

And then there’s this, from “The Hair Thief” (triggered by “Rapunzel”):

Theaters were the best places to steal hair. Zelda would sit behind a girl, usually a girl, though sometimes a boy, with beautiful long hair. The hair didn’t have to be that long. Just long enough to touch without being noticed.

Zelda waited for the best part of the film when everyone stared at the screen unable to turn away, and she lifted the chosen person’s hair with one hand to snip a thick lock off with her well-polished scissors. She kept the scissors oiled so that they made no sound. The lock of hair went in a satin bag and into her purse. She’d never been caught.

She’d stolen hair in other places too. On a bus, though that was tricky. In dance club from a girl passed out at the bar. Even at her mother’s funeral, though she usually didn’t take the hair of people she knew…

The stories don’t generally “conclude.” You won’t find much happily ever at the Asylum, although to be fair, there’s not much bleakly ever after, either. They all (so far) get simply ever-after endings. This adds to the mystery of each story and un-anchors it, sets it adrift, in the sea of story time.

One caveat before you rush off to read these for yourself: as she’d be the first to admit, Marta is rushing the composition of these tales to meet her daily quota. You’ll encounter some typos and the occasional slightly ungainly sentence structure; sometimes a scrap of dialogue may not quite ring true. All of this is stuff familiar from any of our first drafts, especially if composed late at night or sandwiched in among a busy everyday life. (Well, that’s true of mine for sure!)

But if you let your reader’s mind go all squinty-like, so you’re simply absorbing the sense and not focusing on every-so-often mechanical distractions, I think you too may be knocked askew by The Fairy Tale Asylum. I would say all this even if I didn’t consider Marta a friend. (And I would say it, further, even if didn’t envy her storytelling ambition and skill.)

P.S. Marta’s also doing a great job selecting — and doctoring — the images which accompany each tale.

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Note: The image at the top of this post shows a… page? from artist Song Dong’s series, Writing Diary with Water. From The 59th Minute:

For the past decade, Song Dong has employed a calligraphy brush dipped in water, rather than ink, to document his daily reminiscences on stone. The hand-drawn text lasts for just a fleeting moment before it evaporates with the steam that arises from the hot stone’s surface. This practice allows Song Dong to keep his thoughts and musings secret, while at the same time, provides the mental release inherent in traditional diary keeping.