Writing fairy tales by Claire Massey

Also today, Claire Massey, from The Fairy Tale Cupboard and much more, has a guest post at EssentialWriters.com about using fairy tales for inspiration at Writing fairy tales.

Here's the beginning to whet your appetite, then click over to read the rest:

We should probably start with ‘once upon a time’: Once upon a time there was a writer who set out to write a fairy tale…

Brought up with the tales from childhood, we all know the stock phrases and can describe the typical characters and plots (although too much exposure to Disney can lead to the mistaken belief that Princesses must always be rescued, but we’ll get to that).

Fairy tales are one of the oldest types of story we have. The tales have travelled countries, continents and generations. For example, the earliest recorded Cinderella type tale comes from Egypt in the 1st century BCE, and thousands of variants of the tale have been collected from all over the world.