Writing Update: Legends 1

I just finished the final edits on Legends of Kaiatan, which is pretty exciting! Looking back at old posts, I promised to tell you about them, so now seems like a good time.

I had the idea for this story collection a long time ago, back when I was working on… books 3 & 4, I think. At the time, the premise was pretty vague. Stories “loosely based on Earth fairy tales, as they would be if they came from Kaiatan.” Back then, I frequently used Red Riding Hood as the example when I was gushing to people. What would that story look like in a land of shapeshifters? (Oddly, Red ended up being almost the last story I finished, because it gave me troubles. Ahem.)

When I finished book 5 (the contemporary short stories) and started working on the fairy tales, they gave me more trouble than I expected. As is always the case.

I started by reading through all of Andrew Lang’s “colored” Fairy Books. Yes, all of them, I think. Plus some Asian and Irish and English fairy tales and some Greek/Roman myths and the Arabian Nights. So much reading… Fortunately, I like reading.

As I read, I made notes about potential story ideas. Anything based on pure magic wouldn’t work, since Kaiatan doesn’t have “magic that can do anything at all.” Anything with ghosts as a vital part wouldn’t work. Actually, lots of them wouldn’t work. Sigh. But I did end up with a list of 20-30 fairy tales that MIGHT work.

From there, I sorted the ideas into the Kaiatan cultures that would work best. Then I took the list to my critique group and discussed possibilities. Finally, I selected ten stories that I thought I could write well. Armed with that list, I started plotting.

I wanted a variety of stories, so I chose some to be romantic and some not, some long and some short, some funny and some serious. And mixed those up among the cultures. Yes, I am very good at over-thinking. It’s a superpower of mine. On the other hand, it does let me give you some very deep worldbuilding and interconnected plots…

I copied summaries of the source tales into my plotting files and started sorting the different versions into major plot beats, marking differences. For instance, in the Snow White story, I noted the different villains (not always the step-mother, did you know?) and forms of murder, as well as the general timeline.

I spent weeks copying and pasting and summarizing and reordering and deleting and altering…

Once I had the plot beats identified, I started deleting what I couldn’t use and translating what I wanted to keep into outline notes.

In the process, some ideas died and had to be replaced with others. I thought I was going to use Icarus, for instance, but even though it’s a winged story already and I have winged people, when I started plotting, I couldn’t make it work. Le sigh. All my ideas should be good ideas, but sadly, that isn’t true.

And I’ll talk about the actual writing in the next post. 😉

Happy reading,
Marty C. Lee

© 2022 M. C. Lee LLC. All rights reserved.

Author: MCLeeBooks

Marty C. Lee told stories for most of her life, but never took them seriously until her daughter asked her to write the first in the Unexpected Heroes series. Between writing and spending time with her family, she reads, embroiders, and gardens. Her characters take over her brain on a regular basis. If you catch her muttering to thin air, she's probably arguing with one of her characters. She has learned to keep a notebook by her bed to jot down ideas so she can go to sleep and deal with them in the morning.

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