story ideas – Katie L. Carroll

When Monday falls on the first day of the month, #InkRipples always sneaks up on me. I made sure to get my post up on time because I was particularly excited about this month’s topic of fairy tales. One of my most popular archived posts is “Fairy Tale One-Liners” and I’ve taught a writing workshop about mining story ideas from myths, fairy tales, and legends.

Back when #InkRipples was talking tropes (see “Tropes Are All In The Execution”), I said that all tropes have been used before, so it’s all about how you use them in your own way. I believe that’s also true of story ideas. They’ve all been done before, so why not borrow/steal/draw inspiration from other people’s stories. Fairy tales are ripe for the picking because of the universality of themes, their use of archetypes, the fact that many leave threads open in their plots, and the many different fairy tales out there from cultures all over the world.

You might be thinking that there are so many fairy tales retelling that there simply can’t be room for one more. While I’ve thought that myself, it never fails that another retelling comes out to great success. Seems people can’t get enough of retellings and even plan-old redoings (see the long list in “Disney Live-Action Remakes & Other Fairy Tale Movies Release Schedule”).

And it’s not just retellings that can be inspired by fairy tales. I love when a minor fairy tale character gets their own story or when a story is written from a villain’s view point. Even an interesting take on a classic fairy tale theme, i.e. rags to riches or true love’s kiss, can be taken in many different directions.

If I haven’t yet convinced you that there so many ways to use fairy tales for inspiration, stay tuned next week for a post about some of my favorite stories that stemmed from fairy tales, myths, and legends!

What are your favorite fairy tales and stories that mined from those tales?

#InkRipples is a monthly meme created by Katie L. Carroll, Mary Waibel, and Kai Strand. We pick a topic (May is about fairy tales), drop a ripple in the inkwell (i.e. write about it on our blogs), and see where the conversation goes. We’d love to have you join in the conversation on your own blogs or on your social media page. Full details and each month’s topic can be found on my #InkRipples page.

I haven’t had a science update lately, mostly because my favorite science project the Large Hadron Collider is on hiatus. It’s being upgraded to increase its power so it can smash teeny, tiny particles even faster and harder. Scientists are hoping to unlock the secrets of dark matter.

Dark matter is thought to make up a large part of the universe, but so little is known about it. Thinking about the universe and great mysteries like dark matter get my creative juices flowing. One of my favorite science programs is Discovery Channel’s How the Universe Works. It kind of make my head hurts because the theories and science discussed are so mind-blowing in both concept and scope, but boy it’s so exciting to think about the universe.

I took physics classes in high school and college and found them, frankly, boring. Nothing we discussed ignited any sense of excitement. I get that you have to learn the basics to better understand the bigger concepts that theoretical and astrophysicists study, but I wish those basic physics classes had at least sparked some interest in learning more. And they just didn’t do that. It wasn’t until I was an adult, long out of school, that my own curiosity lead me to a passion for learning about the universe.

I hope to one day use a fictional story to meld my passion for writing and creating worlds and characters and my excitement over the universe. It’s been percolating for some time now and I think I have a premise and a main character. But I need to finish up a couple of other projects first and school myself more on the scientific concepts I’ll need to know to make the story authentic. Anyone want to give me a crash course? 🙂

I’ll leave you with this little gem of an article called “Quantum Theory Proves That Consciousness Moves to Another Universe After Death.” It definitely sounds science-fictiony, but it’s one of those ideas that I love reading about, if only to make my head spin a little with both excitement and confusion.