This time, I used Sleeping Beauty as a parallel of sorts for the big picture experience of one of my novel’s characters. I often tend towards the very close and hyper descriptive, so this was a (good) departure for me. The story, though short (800 words), covers around twenty years in a retrospective way. I hadn’t thought of this character in this sort of way previously, so it was helpful in that respect as well — allowing me to consider her more deeply.

I used the basic structure of Sleeping Beauty (the warning (not to touch the spindle), the curiosity overcoming the warning / good sense, the consequence (sleep), waking up) and found that it fit my character’s life experience quite well! It worked extremely well as an archetype. It has also made me reflect that I should probably consider the archetypal qualities of my characters more often. I have done this occasionally — it comes up often in how-to-write books and articles, but it is something that I think I find easy to forget about amongst all the other aspects of planning and writing.