As I grew up, I read and loved many fairy-tale retellings and began to think about writing my own reimagining of 'Rapunzel.'

Kate Forsyth

Categorized in : Think Loved Writing My Own

It has always seemed a cruel joke to me that the very word 'stutter' is difficult for many stutterers to pronounce. It is onomatopoeic, an imitation of the halting, repetitive sound made by people with this speech dysfunction.

me speech sound people

As an adult, I have often been deep in serious conversation with someone I've highly respected and seen them roll an eye as my mouth has mangled yet another magnificently conceived, clumsily articulated sentence. In my mind, the words are mellifluous as honey. In my mouth, they are shards of glass.

deep words serious mind

Every word we speak calls on 37 muscles and thousands of nerves. It's not surprising that sometimes these nerves and muscles fail us.

fail us speak sometimes

Since the moment I could hold a pencil, I have spent nearly all day every day writing. And there is not an age group that I have not written for. You can read me from birth 'til death.

day me age death

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to think that what you need to write a novel is imagination, creativity and a facility with words. Yes, you need all those things, but a novel is a highly complex organism that needs to be dealt with in quite a logical manner.

you creativity imagination people

One reason why so little is known about the German resistance is because it was never a united movement in the way that it was in France or Poland. It was simply too dangerous.

never dangerous reason way

Stories are like that. Like cities, they are built on the stones... by Kate Forsyth

Stories are like that. Like cities, they are built on the stones and bones of the past.

like bones stones past

When our ancestors crouched about the camp fire at night, they told each other tales of gods and heroes, monsters and marvels, to hold back the terrors of the night. Such tales comforted and entertained, diverted and educated those who listened, and helped shape their sense of the world and their place in it.

place fire night world

We all want to win against all odds. We all want to be loved. We all wish it was possible to change our world and to make our world a better place.

loved win change world

Sanitising stories, leaching out all of the sense of danger and the darkness out of the stories, actually reduces them and stops them from doing what they're supposed to do, which is teach us how to manage our lives.

doing how teach darkness

Fairytales were never really meant for children; they were meant as cautionary tales for teenagers on the verge of growing up.

teenagers never growing-up children

To tell the truth, fairytales have never gone out of style. They have been told and retold for thousands of years, finding new shapes and structures with each new generation of tellers.

generation new style truth

The storyline of a fantasy novel is filled with such a sense of enchantment, beauty and strangeness; it allows the writer to explore the big ontological questions of life that would sound like a sermon in a social realist novel.

fantasy sound beauty life