Fairy Tales
Sun 2004-12-19 23:10:47 (in context)
- 50,011 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 9.50 hrs. revised
The original seed of this novel came from wanting to turn The Little Mermaid around. I wanted to write a story in which after the mermaid rescues the prince, instead of the mermaid following him onto the land, the prince goes into the water after her. (I tried the idea out on my husband, who promptly said, "He'd drown," forgetting, I suppose, that we're talking about fairy tale fantasy where magic isn't against the rules.)
Of course, what made this idea take over NaNoWriMo 2003, shoving the unicorn girl story aside to wait another year, was giving in to the prurient adolescent impulse (and, really, are we ever too old for prurient adolescent impulses?) to sexualize the first encounter of the two main characters, resulting in a whole bunch of implications that wouldn't get out of my head. But that's not the point.
The point is, I did want to incorporate the key elements of Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale into this story. Somewhere during the painful rush for fifty thousand words I lost sight of that goal, and now, coming back to the manuscript, I find myself wondering whether attempting it now would result in too much artificiality.
But there are some places where I can see that I tried to inject the fairy tale into the story. The meeting with the Great White is reminiscent of the Little Mermaid's interview with the sea witch, certainly. And the Inanna/Ereskegal motif isn't completely out of place - Inanna's casting aside of her many acoutrements at the gates of the underworld can be seen in Anderson's mermaid's sacrifice of her tail, her voice, and the ability to move without pain.
And there's a point at which, in my story, the mermaids refer to the main character as "silent stalker" - they cannot hear his movements the way they can hear each other's.
Obviously I wanted to oblige my main character, like the fairy tale mermaid, to give up his voice. But I guess I forgot about that along the way. Or maybe I decided it was too much trouble to deal with in 30 days. In any case, there are pages and pages of long conversations between the MC and his seagoing lover. Long, pointless conversations. Word-padding conversations.
It occurs to me that if I make him mute, that magically removes a whooooole bunch of awful purple dialogue from the manuscript. And that would be a very good thing.
Plus it's a lot more plausible to call him "silent" because he can't speak (no air vibrating against his vocal chords, duh) than it would be to somehow posit that his swimming makes no sound. He pushes the water about just as much as any mermaid does, so it would be silly to say they couldn't hear him moving.
And - oh boy, bonus! - the MC's inability to comminicate with the very person who could give him all the answers he needs would give me a brand new sub-conflict to play with. I don't know if it'll be as integral to the final outcome as the Little Mermaid's silence was in Anderson's fairy tale (because she couldn't speak, she couldn't win the prince's love, and so she lost her life), but it's certainly got legs.
Fins, I mean. It's got fins.