Friday 25 February 2011

Food and Fairy Tales - Day 43

Two things I've learned in the last two days...


Today: It's been a munchy day. I've felt hungry almost every moment since I woke up no matter what I eat and its driving me to making poorly thought out decisions on snacks. I tried drinking water whenever I feel hungry because maybe that's what I need, but it didn't help. I finally stopped myself on a quick road to discouragement by asking myself "If you could have ANY snack you want right now, what would it be?" After a moment of though I said "String cheese and an apple with peanut butter." Now, we don't have that in the house, but after nailing down an idea of what my body is asking for I can proceed intentionally instead of just grabbing pieces of anything that's in sight and not being satisfied with any of it.
Yesterday: I have an aspiration to write a fairy tale or so before I die and yesterday I was reading from George Macdonald's (The Golden Key and The Shadows particularly). What makes a good fairy tale? What are the common themes in all the ones I like? Here are the things I thought of:

1. The best fairy tale characters are kids. They just handle it so much better than adults who usually over think the most simple things in fairyland. I think that's why the Hobbits made such good main characters in Lord of the Rings.
2. There has to be a moral to the story. A fairy tale with no moral is like a tootsie pop with no tootsie. It just doesn't have the substance that a reader wants. I don't even think WHAT the moral is really matters, just as long as it has one. I can currently recall morals ranging from "Don't care too much about how you look" all the way to "Laying your life down for another."
3. It has to have things that can't be explained, and that don't exist in our world. I've found that my favorite stories are the ones that have one common thing (the gem mine in The Silver Chair) that you can relate to, but then there really isn't anything common about that thing (you could smell and taste the gems there). It makes you think "Yes, it seems like that's the way it's really supposed to be!" or "I've always kinda had a feeling something like that was true."

Now I'm going to go eat some cheddar and a pear.

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