“What if?” Folklore as a Source

“What if?” Folklore as Source

By Melissa Marr

One of the questions every writer hears regularly is “where do you get your ideas?” Answers to this one range from quips to “everything” to very specific “this story came from ___.” All of these are true answers (or, they can be. . . writers being writers, there are inevitably truth-bendings going on sometime. Frex, a friend & I concocted a “how did you meet story” that involved broken hearts & an octopus, but that’s another topic).

Every story I have started begins with a “what if” or a “what next.” Moreover, every one of those is connected to folklore or/and fairy tales in some way.

Lore & life in my texts

My first novel, Wicked Lovely, utilizes a few fairy tale tropes--in part for the purpose of defying them. There's a curse that can only be broken by finding the "fated love" . . . of course, the fated love doesn't quite want to be found, and the cursed faery is already in love with someone he hoped was his fated love, but wasn't . . . sorta, maybe. I had good fun playing with questions of volition and power here, the idea of what happily-ever-after means, and other fairy tale tidbits like a "woken with a kiss" scene wherein being "woken" is an awakening (i.e. epiphany rather than literally awakening). That novel is also very rooted in a folklore, specifically tales of Cailleach Bheur and of the King of Summer.

I used some of the same lore and fairy tale tropes in a short story in Cricket in 2007. It derives, in part, from my on-going love of Cailleach Bheur, but in it the protag is a girl who carries "Winter's Kiss" and feels it a burden rather than a joy. I added this to a world in which global warming is a problem, and threw in my childhood dream of traveling with an ice-bear (polar bear) that is a result of a fairy tale, & well, it became a story about a girl who carries winter and boy who is also a bear.

The second novel (Ink Exchange) was playing with the Unseelie Court, my fondness for tattoos (I have a lot of ink tucked away under my clothes), & my own experience of being a rape survivor.

. . . and so forth and so on.

Fragile Eternity plays with the “don’t eat the food of Faerie” (which is also in the Hades/Persephone tale). Radiant Shadows is a result of my interest in the Wild Hunt. Similarly, my short stories have played with drug dealing and Haitian zombie powder (“Two Lines” in Unbound) inversion of the selchies entrapping men trope (“Love Struck” in Love is Hell), vampires and the power of crossroads (“Transitions” in Teeth).

My forthcoming adult novel (Graveminder ) sparked from a bit of lore on “minding the dead” and a family tradition of visiting cemeteries a lot.

Why write from folklore?

I didn’t intend to write these things. In many ways, writing is a bit of an accident for me. I grew up with these sorts of stories, the supernatural wasn’t just the stuff in my books, it was/is real in my family. I’ve been told not to go places because of the various creatures lurking out there; I’ve also been sent out to “catch” a faery that was lurking around the woodpile. I’m passing that tradition on to my children as best I can.

When my son was a preschooler, we read about trolls. (Spouse is of Scandinavian descent, so I had to incorporate that body of lore and myth into my Irish & Scottish.) Son developed a fixation on “catching” trolls, so he explained the problem to my mother—who promptly went to her neighbor and asked to build a troll trap. We ran into only one snag:

Mum: Suze can build a trap, but she needs to know how big the trolls you have are. We might have a different species here than you do in California.

Me: Hmm. I’ll ask.

Son: Cat sized, maybe rabbit sized.

It didn’t occur to any of us that there was much odd about the question. Trolls do come in various sizes. Faeries do too. Wales has Ellylon, tiny little fey things, but Scotland has some mortal and some monstrous sized fey. Scandinavia has skogsra (women with hollow backs). Luckily, we had the answer we needed, so Suze built a sturdy wooden troll trap (with a good leather hinge) and shipped it to California.

How do I learn this stuff?

It’s really a case of write what I know. After a folklore saturated childhood, I grew up and became a lit major and after that a lit teacher at university. My focus areas were Romantic, Victorians, & the American South. Mmmm. Ghosts, Byronic heroes, Frankenstein, Dracula, the “Mortal Immortal,” Southern Gothic! Oh yes, literature is riddled with some weird stuff. Delicious, macabre, and addictive. Stir the lit into the lore, and I was on my way to being where I am now.

Somewhere in there, I also discovered scholarly journals . . . FOLKLORE and THE LION AND THE UNICORN and MARVELS AND TALES (among others). I still curl up with these. In my stack as I write are, "The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story” (Smijac), “Bedding the Nightmare” (Blecourt), and “Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis” (Spencer) . . and get this—all of this fun reading is justified because it’s work.

*pauses*

Yeah, I get to read what interests me, drown in it, and I know that somewhere along the line, I’ll get that moment where I say, “oooooh, what if . . .”

What about you? What interests do YOU have that you can tap for stories . . . or just because they're fun? Tell me something interesting--about anything at all--and one reader/responder to this blog wins a copy of UNBOUND (the adult anthology I did with some of my co-bloggers here: Jeaniene Frost, Vicki Patterrson, & Joce Drake) OR LOVE IS HELL (the YA Antho).*

Winner announced next month (on August 4th by Jeaniene bc I'll be leaving for Scotland August 2nd).

WINNERS FROM LAST MONTH

signed copy of RADIANT SHADOWS to a US resident: PROJECTANIME
signed copy of RADIANT SHADOWS to an international reader: MOUNTIE9
signed copy of WICKED LOVELY to a US resident: NYMFAUX
signed copy of WICKED LOVELY to an international reader: RENATA
signed copy of any of my books to a library collection (must be requested by a librarian!)*: SUSIE SHARP LIBRARIAN
second signed copy of any of my books to a library collection (must be requested by a librarian!)* BRELEMON

Winners, please email donna@melissa-marr.com with your user name, address, & to whom you want/if you want the book personalized.