“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman
Lately I’ve been in the very first flush of planning for a couple of new products and I’ve had to think carefully about who I was trying to reach and what I was trying to say.
This is a new thing for me. Generally I just do what I like and hope that someone, anyone, finds it as interesting as I do. (I’m only half joking here).
Seriously, I believe that vulnerability is so rare that anything we create with the intention of communicating our experience of being human, conveyed in an authentic way, will find an audience with at least one other human….and probably more.
But anyway, the best I could come up with was that I was trying to reach people who like stories…but that seemed too vague. After all, who doesn’t like stories?
What kind of stories? Unless they have eclectic tastes, the readers of gritty crime thrillers are not necessarily going to immediately warm to my more romantic and floaty images.
No, I seemed far more likely to find my audience amongst lovers of fairy tales.
And what connects the lovers of fairy tales? To paraphrase Neil Gaiman, the lovers of fairy tales are connected by their belief that dragons can be slain. The lovers of fairy tales, and fantasy literature in general, are believers in possibility, in transformation, in redemption. Or at the very least, they want to believe.
When we begin a fairy tale we are thrust, often forcefully, into the story of a character we don’t yet know. There is a tension, a darkness looming and we know that soon they will be asked to step up and fulfil their potential. The question at this point is merely “are they up to the challenge?”
And then everything goes to hell. They fail. Often repeatedly. Life generally sucks and nothing is what they thought it would be. They are unable to make a difference. They are only one small person struggling against the forces of darkness. And, in the most authentic fairy tales, someone invariably gets eaten.
Sound familiar? Ok, so it’s a little dramatic but isn’t that kind of how you feel sometimes? Minus the eating.
Could it be that we love these stories so much because they are far more like our everyday lives than they might seem at first glance?
There is, of course, a reason why I have stopped before the end. This is where the majority of us are in the story right now. It’s easy to get stuck in the failing, and failing, and failing. And in our own lives, sometimes we can start to wonder if this is all there is.
But fairy tales teach us to hold on for the final act.
They teach us to believe that if we are willing to become the hero of our own story we can get our resolution, our happy ending of sorts. It might be bittersweet, and it often is, but we will rediscover our belief in possibility.
The problem is that when we’re in the middle of fighting the dragon, we’re a little too distracted to keep our eye on that happy ending.
Whether your dragon is a toxic relationship, or a stressful job, or any other way in which life is not what you imagined it might be, you need find a way to believe that you can kick that dragon’s ass and move on…Even if it’s just to the even bigger dragon on the next page.
I create my work to connect with those people who want to believe in magic and possibility and because I need to believe it myself. I create my work to connect with the dreamers and the dragonslayers, the poets and the princes, the warriors and the witches. Because we’re all fighting a hard fight to the finale and we need to know we are not alone.