The Fairytale Within the Story
I believe that fairytales can be windows into our collective psyche. They’re storytelling at its most basic. In a fairytale there is no room for character development. Dialogue, setting, and description are all very sketchy. What remains are stories in which the fat has been removed; underneath are bare, beautiful bones in which it’s easy to trace motif, themes, and morality—especially morality.
In each of my two previous books, The Raven Prince (11/06) and The Leopard Prince (4/07), I’ve used a fairytale as a way of highlighting and mirroring the main story. In my third book, The Serpent Prince (on sale this month) I do so again.
The hero of The Serpent Prince, Simon Iddesleigh, Viscount Iddesleigh, tells the fairytale to the heroine, Lucy Craddock-Hayes. Throughout The Serpent Prince, Simon is pursuing a course of revenge—he’s challenging his enemies to duels—which makes him deeply ambivalent about accepting Lucy’s love. He doesn’t believe he deserves her love. When you read The Serpent Prince, watch how Simon tells the fairytale to Lucy—and how Lucy reacts. The fairytale he’s telling is a basic one about a goat girl who gains power over a shape-shifting magician by stealing his serpent skin.
Now, if you know anything about fairytales, you should be able to figure out how the story ends. The goat girl asks three wishes of the serpent prince magician, he grants them, and she wins the love of the king’s son. Simple, right? But remember that Simon is the one telling the story and he is the serpent prince. Lucy may very well not like the outcome of the story he’s telling and she’s not a woman without opinions.
One of the wonderful things about romance novels is the how they teach us to think outside the box. Very often the heroine makes a conscious decision to change her destiny, to not follow the path laid before her, to wander into the woods and greet the big bad wolf head-on. That’s the kind of fairytales I tell: the ones where the heroine decides her own fate. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them.
