Old Tales with a New Twist

Recently, I had the pleasure to sit down with fairytale author Lynden Wade to discuss her writing, her approach to new stories, and the support she has found in other writers.

MM: Would you like to give me a little introduction of yourself?

LW: I’ve always been writing. I got more serious about it about fifteen years ago, and I published for the first time ten years ago; it was a short story in an anthology of poems. I developed a taste for writing fairy tales, my own original ones. I enjoyed publishing them in anthologies and magazines, but because magazines stories will get archived after a bit or not visible because the new stories come up, and the older ones go out of print, I thought I’d publish my own collection of fairytales, which was a really enjoyable process, despite the pains of formatting. People have been really supportive, particularly other authors or people in writing, for instance, Georgina Warren, whom I met in London recently. I’ve got a creative writing workshop coming up, I’ve been asked by some local people to run one, so that’s really interesting.

MM: What inspired you to start writing?

LW: Having the time and headspace to do it, honestly. Before that, the big pause was when my children were small and very lively. So really it was a return to manuscripts that I had started before that, and one of the manuscripts, which I still haven’t mentioned, was inspired by a university course. One part of the course was studying Victorian melodrama, and the university I was at had an archive of old Victorian plays, pent-up ones about vampires and murders and betrayals and so on, so that was one of my inspirations.

MM: What does your writing process look like?

LW: Very messy, I love the bit where I’m getting all the ideas, going down rabbit holes of research, trying to put it all together, planning. I’m mostly a planner I think, especially for something longer. I discovered ‘save the cat’ – when a friend said she couldn’t bear the books, so I bought them off her – which I’ve found works for me for getting the arc of the story, it doesn’t solve everything but it’s quite a good structure to try and place my ideas into. Lots of drafts and rounds of editing, I’m finding it easier to go through a manuscript or a short story one strand at a time, looking for the characters’ motivation in one, the antagonist’s development in another. Swapping with other writers as well, because getting feedback is really important and useful.

MM: Are you the type of person who edits once the whole story is done, or do you edit while writing?

LW: I try not to edit as I write, but I do it sometimes: I can’t just have a sentence and not fiddle with it. But really, I know it is better to leave that small stuff until later because I might be chopping whole bits of it, so it’s silly to play with that until I’ve got a whole picture. So that’s the idea to work towards: edit at the end.

MM: Are you inspired or intimidated by the blank page?

LW: I can be intimidated by it, so it’s better for me not to stare at it, especially on a laptop because it’s very pixellated, grey, and uninspiring. Sometimes it’s better though, if I’m stuck on a piece and I know it needs rewriting: rather than staring at the words, I find it easier to just make a space by pressing return lots of times, and rewrite in the space, without those other words bugging me down. Put it in a new notebook, that’s lovely.

MM: So, you write both on the computer and longhand?

LW: I’ve been doing a bit of longhand lately, it was useful for travel, when we were going to Canada for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t bear to not write so I wrote a whole draft by hand and it’s quite nice writing a short story in a notebook, in a coffee shop, that’s quite good for the ideas flowing.

MM: Do you have a support network to rely on?

LW: My husband is supportive, although it’s not his type of writing, otherwise it’s mostly a solitary thing really, but I find it useful for being myself rather than someone else’s tutor, someone else’s mother, someone else’s neighbour. I have local friends as well: I’ve joined little support writing groups over the years, and I’ve found that they haven’t been quite what I was looking for so I left some, but I’ve made friends there with whom I stayed in contact with over the years. I enjoy having friends that you can chat with on WhatsApp, meeting them for coffee – they’ve been ones that I have swapped manuscripts with – they would do me a favour one time and I would do them a favour later, reading and giving feedback.

MM: Is there something you’re currently working on?

LW: Yes, I’m working on something quite different from the fairytales collection, it’s a ghost story but hopefully not a depressing one, quite an upbeat one. It’s inspired by a place not far from me, which is a small holding and one runs crafting workshops, it’s such a wonderful place. It used to be a nursery, so it’s got the old greenhouse it’s a little bit like gothic ruins but in a comforting way. My novel is set in the time of covid, so the characters have moved into this small holding, and they find that they can’t really go out or visit anyone because of covid, so they are stuck with the ghost.

MM: From what I could gather I think you’ve mostly published short stories?

LW: Yes, that’s right. I do have novels on my hard drive, I’ve sent various ones off to agents, without a result. Now often later on I go back and I say ‘oh I should have changed this and that’. But the situation is getting harder and harder to publish now, and I think my work doesn’t really fit what is mainstream and what sells well, what publishers are looking for at the moment, so I’ll probably carry on with self-publishing.

MM: I think you also had a blog for a while, right?

LW: Yes, I moved to Substack because I found that it can have the best of both worlds with social media and blogging, and it seems to be very good for cross pollinating, so I’m writing on there at the moment, but I’m aware that the blog is better for people to find what I’m writing, I think. So, I’m not sure how to solve that but I am writing on Substack now.

MM: Is it a continuous story or is it new little pieces of writing every time?

LW: It’s newsie stuff really so it’s non-fiction, it’s not a serial, it’s just news about what I’m writing. Where I’ve been is quite fun to write about as well, which castles I’ve visited, or forests for instance, and sometimes little thoughts about a fairytale or a legend, and a new way I’ve found for looking at them, so that links back to my writing.

MM: So, you have focused mostly on fairytales, and from what I understand not all of them are retellings, but they are inspired by traditional fairytales?

LW: They are yes, some of them are a reworking of the tale, so the same structure of the traditional tale but the characters are different: they have different personalities, their settings might be different. Then others are like a sequel to the story, so what happens to this character afterwards, if you know the story it helps but it could work on its own. Then others are just using elements of fairytales and fantasy, so that’s something original. For instance, there is one using the story of the emperor’s clothes, but it’s from the point of view of one of the weavers and her version suggests that people got her wrong, or that something entirely different happened, the dislike that people have for her after and how she deals with it. It can be quite challenging sometimes to try and rework a tale, because you’re still using the tale but make it something different, but your something different also has its own internal logic.

MM: When you start a new project, how do you decide if it is going to be a short story or something longer? Because I know several writers who just start something and realise that the length of it isn’t working halfway through the project.

LW: I think that often. In the past I’ve known whether it was going to be short or long, by the amount of stories that are raised in the characters. But for the work I was telling you about, the ghost in the green house, I just wrote it and it came out as too long for a short story and not long enough for a novel. Apparently, it’s called a novelette, but this one is expanding so I think it will become a novella at some point. So, for this case it’s just how it ended up and I’m inclined to relax a bit more about how something is going to go, just write and get the feel of it, the vibes and the atmosphere, and see where it goes afterwards rather than planning how every little detail would work out.

MM: Do you send works to publishers that you had written before, or do you sometimes specifically write something for a theme or a wordcount asked by a publisher?

LW: It’s a mix of the two, generally I’ve been looking for markets for something that I have already written, and anthologies are particularly good because I’m not very good at writing really short stories. Magazines often want flash fiction which I can’t do, it always ends up longer. Occasionally I’ve written to a theme, more often with a magazine. The last time I did it I was really frustrated, I was thinking ‘oh this is such hard work, why do I put myself through it? I should just look for opportunities for finished stories’ but then once I stepped away from it and got accepted – which was nice – I reread it for proofreading for the magazine and I felt quite happy with it, I was quite pleased with the story after all. You can get to that point in editing where you hate the whole thing and wish you had never started, but you need that distance.

MM: What is your favorite and least favorite part about writing?

LW: My two favorite parts are starting off the ideas when it’s all sparkling that’s lovely andrereading it when it’s nearly finished, feeling like it’s coming together. My least favorite part so far has been formatting for self-publishing, because it’s really dry and frustrating: you put something in and then something happens and all formatting has disappeared and you have tostart again.

You can find more of Lynden’s work via the links below:

Instagram: @lwadewrites

Facebook: @LyndenWadeWriter

Website:
http://lyndenwadeauthor.weebly.com/

Substack:
https://queensquillsquests.substack.com/

Book: The Tapestry Unravels
https://mybook.to/TapestryUnravels