 “Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can’t fake a thought.” - I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Iain Reid.
Not a great book, not necessarily a bad one either, but I found passages that stood out to me that stayed with me for days after. The above quote is one such passage that gave me pause and is something I found myself mulling over. It brought me to my own moments, of social situations; birthdays, weddings, coffee dates or kids parties, where you find yourself just not wanting to be there. You feel uncomfortable or even miserable. Perhaps there was an argument beforehand with your partner or maybe you just had a bad night's sleep. Your mind is on repeat the whole drive there, “I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go,” a drumming rhythm that gets louder and louder in your mind the closer you get. You arrive, wrestling with your thoughts and wearing that carefully constructed smile that your face learnt to do on impulse that never quite reaches the eyes. You learn to recognise that same smile at times in others. A lie, to protect those around you from… what? The appearance of normality? The societal norms that have been instilled in us since birth? Or to protect yourself maybe? From having to give voice to your own thoughts because once you do, those thoughts, they become real. Real. What a terrifying thought. My own true thoughts come out at night. Midnight has always been my hour. The long and weary day of having to do all the things expected of me are over, everyone’s asleep. And what’s left at that hour is just… me. The smile slips, like smeared lipstick smudging away the day's perfection, and the thoughts that have been held back all day come out in relief. How often do we do this? Go to places we don’t want to go, speak with people we have nothing in common with because we have to, make that awful small talk with people you’ve known for years who have never quite known or understood you. Fuck. I don’t even know if they understand themselves. We go to work, to family functions, important events that feel like pulling out teeth at times and paste on this version of ourselves that we don’t really like. Not so much because of the company, but because of the restrictive mask we place on ourselves, a muzzle that’s been there so long that we hardly notice it anymore. My own thoughts come out in a rush of words, kind of like these, written because I’ve always been better at writing than speaking. You'd think a writer would be good at speaking too. You'd be wrong. I need time to collect my thoughts and writing is the only way I can truly be honest in away I never could by merely talking. Sometimes, I’d dare voice my thoughts to others. Sometimes they’re welcome and I feel a rare moment of being understood by someone. A smile, so real it almost comes as a surprise takes over but those can be so rare that I can't help but wonder at it. Mostly, though, they float away into nothing, and I crawl into myself, feeling emptier inside than before. So I just write it out. Because without words, without giving voice to our thoughts, surely that way lies madness? Or is it just me? Maybe I wasn’t built right. The pretence exhausts me, words build up inside me, spilling over while I try to hold them down. It’s a form of torture on the mind. We all have thoughts we’d never voice aloud. Deep, inner thoughts that, frankly, are better left in the dark where they belong. What an awful world it would be if everyone spoke their thoughts aloud. But what a sad world it is that we cannot ever feel that we can voice some of those thoughts that make us us. Some thoughts are fleeting, born from an emotion that we feel so intensely and once it has run its course, those thoughts are diminished, only a hint of it remaining, laying low somewhere in the shadows of our minds. Somewhere along the way though, we’ve learnt to bury more and more of ourselves and who we are with them. We’ve become so good at it that we wouldn’t even notice it anymore if it weren’t for the exhaustion that inevitably takes hold. That fixed smile, the one we wear for appearances, becomes so heavy. Where does our reality really exist? What is truth? The part we choose to show the world? Or the part we keep carefully hidden away in our minds?
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  ~ The North Wind ~ A Stranger's Tale Illustrated by Adam Oehlers Whenever I’m asked what I write, I have to pause for a moment.
How do I say that I write my own fairy tales without the instant assumption that I write for children? That instant dismissal that what I write isn’t something to be considered serious. How do I convey that fairy tales are so much more than what people perceive them to be? Fairy tales have been around for a long, long time. They were passed down from mother to child generation after generation, well before many people could read or write. And with each telling, something would change. Small things. A new element would be added, or removed, day may turn to night, the cat becomes a dog, the humble hearth witch a hideous thing of nightmares. But always, the message, the lesson, the moral… remains the same. Folklore has been an integral part of human civilization since the very beginning. A blending of the oral and written traditions and a merging of various renditions of the same narrative. For instance, the Cinderella tale can be traced back to ancient China and Egypt, with variations emerging based on the cultural background of the storyteller. Even though fairy tales are often associated with children, they were originally something for both adults and children to enjoy. While they can be cautionary tales for children, with important life lessons to be learnt (this is a whole other topic that I may just write about all on its own) most are quite dark, gruesome, and violent and if you have read many of the original Brother’s Grimm tales, you will know exactly what I’m talking about. Fairy tales have always played such an integral part in our lives and these old tales that have been so carefully collected and preserved so that we can still enjoy them today, contain so much wisdom. They speak to us of the mystery of this world and beyond. Of nature, of birth, of life and death. They are ruthless, they are brutal, they contain something in them which we cannot let go of. We are drawn to these old tales. Something about them compels us to continue telling them, to continue reading them, to twist them and put our own spin on them, whatever that may be. To try to recreate, to try to learn and above all, I believe it is to try to understand. And they can still teach us so much if we only let them. This is what I write. Tales to make readers think. To make them feel. To make them face hard truths and realities with hidden depths and layer after layer of meaning and thought and symbolism. I write with the intention of recreating the way old storytelling was once told. I like to think that A Stranger’s Tale would have been one of those tales that could fit so seamlessly inside a volume of a Brother’s Grimm collection. My story, Old Mother, another tale that could seamlessly slip from the lips of one person to another, travelling through the winds of this world and told and retold by so many, something changing ever so with each new telling. This is what I write. This is where my heart lies. With the tales of old, brought into the present to remind us of the importance of the oral and written words and the power that they contain.  Hey folks! Here's a quick interview I did with Samantha Goodwin, the host of the Indie Book Cover Competition where my book, A Stranger's Tale, made finalist out of 200 amazing books that entered. It's always such a surreal experience getting interviewed and something I don't think I'll ever quite get used to. But here it is and I hope you enjoy it. Nataša xx So, I was asked to write a bit of an article for IngramSpark's blog on writing a fairy tale and I have to say, I really enjoyed it. I'm quite proud of how it turned out! I'll re-post the entire article here soon but for now, you can check it out by following the link below.
www.ingramspark.com/blog/writing-a-fairy-tale Much love x |
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