I caught up with fairytale author H. L. Burke for a special interview on Tell A Fairy Tale Day. Her latest fairy tale is titled Ashen, a Cinderella retelling.
With regards to the inspiration of Ashen, did you start with the idea to write a fairy tale retelling of Cinderella? Or was Ashen an original concept that mirrored Cinderella and you adopted it as a retelling?
I came up with the story first and then kept on running into “oh, but if I do that, people will think it’s a Cinderella story” things … to the point that I gave in and actually went back in and added a few elements to make it even more Cinderella-esque. The “ball/dance” was not an element in my original plot. I upped the number of times I mentioned the ashes and created the glass shoe reference at the end. I have done fairy tale retellings before, but more often I write fairy-tale-style original stories. This one was supposed to be one of them, but that didn’t happen, obviously.
Would you ever consider a sequel or another story set in Lizbete’s world?
Probably not. I never say never for reasons, but Lizbete’s story ends right where I want it to, and there aren’t any other characters I can see carrying the world forward. While the world is cool, it’s very insular–one small, isolated village–so going back to it would be kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to find something else that could happen there … and if I left the village for the wider world around it, it would have a much different overall feel, to the point where there wouldn’t be a reason to keep them connected.
What primary emotion do you hope to evoke from your readers when they finish Ashen?
Coziness and the feeling of coming home. Lizbete as a character has the primary drive of wanting to connect in a meaningful way. Her “condition” has kept her an outsider, and even the people who love her have to be kept at arm’s length so that she doesn’t accidentally harm them. She’s not longing for “adventure” or great things. She wants small, domestic things. That is her ideal happily ever after, and it’s what I hope readers feel through her.
Fairy Tales
Do you believe all fairy tales ought to have a significant kiss or a significant death? Why or why not?
I’m not big on rules for … just about anything creative. There are plenty of fairy tales that don’t have these elements (Tom Thumb, The Bremen Town Musicians, The Brave Little Tailor just to name three). Even the more traditional romantic ones don’t necessarily hinge upon a kiss (Beauty and the Beast hinges on a confession of love/agreement to marry in most accepted versions, but not a kiss. Cinderella doesn’t have a kiss or a death, though her mom is already dead at the start and some people do lose toes … etc). So definitely not. There are a lot of varying aspects to fairy tales because they come out of a very broad tradition of spoken word stories across multiple cultures. I think we have kind of gotten used to the most basic of these that have been broadly shared by Disney, but it’s an incredibly varied genre.
Technique
If you could retell one of the more popular fairy tales without using magic or the supernatural, which one would you choose and why?
Not really an answer, but I just have to stop and say, writing a fairy tale without magic, to me, would be like baking a dessert without sugar … I’d just be like … sad. I can barely write other genres without some sort of magical element. I tried switching to contemporary romance once. I had to write it from the POV of a cat to keep myself invested, and even then I barely eked out a short novella before I lost interest and started writing about a ghost cat instead. I like my sparkly shiny magical stuff.
What is one trap you find other modern stories fall into when they retell fairy tales?
I feel there is a need to gritty them up or twist them around to the point where the original themes are lost. I’m not saying that you can’t write a version of a classic story where the villain is the hero and the heroes are the villains–but I’m saying that once it’s been done by someone as mainstream as Disney, it’s probably not the original, edgy twist you think it is. There needs to be more. Too often these sorts of stories get rid of the things people liked (the happy parts, the parts to look up to or look forward to) but neglect to replace them with anything and they feel a little empty.
Thanks for Reading,
H.(Heidi) L. Burke
H. L. Burke is the author of multiple fantasy novels including the Dragon and the Scholar saga, the Nyssa Glass YA Steampunk series, and the fairy tales An Ordinary Knight, To Court A Queen and Coiled. She is an admirer of the whimsical, a follower of the Light, and a believer in happily ever after.