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Suggested time: 1 — 3 hours
Choose a traditional fairy tale that you want to fracture, or tell with some sort of strange twist. The goal of this exercise is to write the tale in segments with links, offering the reader choices for how the story progresses. Here are some suggestions:
- “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”
- “Little Red Riding Hood”
- “The Three Little Pigs
Start by deciding on the moral of the tale. You might have three morals, depending on which path the reader chooses. Traditional tales have morals such as:
- Don’t trust someone who flatters you.
- Don’t be conceited.
- The race is not to the swift, or the battle to the strong (the tortoise can win).
The moral that you choose can be fractured too. Dorothy Parker is famous for saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Write the fairy tale with three different endings that are linked to either three different points of view or three different morals. For example, one path of the story might tell “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” from Mama Bear’s point of view, another from Goldilocks’s, and the third from Baby Bear’s.