Folktales

Folktales are a favorite of mine. First of all, I just love those kinds of stories. Secondly, their general structure and themes strike close to the core of storytelling, which allows them to hook any reader. They speak to universal human truths, in an efficient and effective way.

Obviously, I had to dedicate a chapter to the “rules” of folktales, and challenge you to write one yourself.

What is folklore?

Folklore refers to the folktales that live in the collective consciousness of a folk or culture. They’re the stories that almost everyone knows (and tells each other) in that culture. Maybe even foundational stories that inspired their religion, customs or special holidays.

In other words,

First Rule: folktales are simple. Otherwise they are hard to remember or tell your children every night.

Second Rule: folktales are universal. Otherwise they’d only stick with a small percentage of people, not an entire tribe or culture.

As long as your story challenges a universal human truth in interesting ways, it can be very simple and predictable, and still be a great story. It will also feel like folktale.

The Four Types

Folklore is an umbrella term. It has four commonly known subcategories.

• Fairy Tales: stories with magic, fantastical creatures and kingdoms. Usually a battle between good and evil.
• Fables: stories with anthropomorphic animals ( = animals who behave like humans) that aim to teach a moral lesson
• Legends: stories about events, places or people (“folk heroes”) on an epic scale. Usually based on true history.
• Myths: stories with a religious or spiritual basis that aim to explain how something came to be (in our current world).

As you can see, there is overlap between the categories. Many stories will be a bit of multiple categories. Or they’ll be 90% myth, but with 10% magic and fantasy thrown in.

The Four Elements

Any folktale has four elements.

• A virtue: something universally deemed a good trait to have
• A flaw in your hero because they are missing the virtue
• A challenge that tests this flaw
• A challenger (that proposes or executes the challenge)

Maybe you start to see why I see folktales as the core of storytelling. Those four elements are usually all the story has. They are the smallest piece of plot that will lead to a satisfying story: a character flaw, a challenge, they return from the challenge having changed.

The Virtue

This is a bit subjective—and that’s the whole point. That’s why we tell the stories.

Take loyalty. I think many would call that a good trait to have, a virtue. But what if you’re loyal to the wrong people, aiding them in committing atrocities? What if your loyalty is blind, trusting someone entirely just because you’ve decided to always trust them?

That’s why I’d define a virtue as behavior that helps the social group in which the hero lives. Your surroundings determine what’s “morally right”. The idea of morals is so that people (within the social group) help each other and work together, instead of fighting each other or being selfish.

In one social group, loyalty could be virtue. In another, lack of loyalty is a virtue.

Your story should clearly portray what the virtue is—and most importantly, your hero is missing it.

The Flaw

As stated, this is the lack of that virtue. The virtue is honesty? Your hero is a liar who just can’t help themselves. The virtue is being careful? Your hero runs into danger with their eyes closed.

Find actions and behavior that show the hero is missing it. That’s much stronger than literally stating it.

The Challenger

This is the hardest part, but also the most interesting.

It’s not interesting to challenge your hero through random events or something out of everyone’s control. It’s not interesting to challenge the hero completely internally, having the story take place mostly in their head.

So, what do folktales do? An entity must provide the challenge. This entity must be specific and physical.

For example, they invent a magical creature that the hero meets in the forest. They turn a forest into a magical location that seems alive, testing the hero at every turn. The challenger must be some intelligent force who seemingly “designed” the perfect challenge for the hero.

The challenger often isn’t “good” or “bad”. It’s just somebody who is. And their nature, their existence, is the thing that challenges the hero.

Traditionally, this challenger is a very natural force. The earliest folktales were about warning for the dangers in nature, for animals who might eat you, or long falls off a cliff. That’s why the challenger is usually an animal or creature who lives in close harmony with nature. Somebody who is powerful, chaotic and unpredictable. Somebody who helps if you treat them well, but fights if you treat them badly.

The Challenge

Finally, the challenge is a decision the hero must make because of the Challenger.

This one answers the central question: “Will the hero see their flaws in time (and how)? Or will the hero fail to learn the virtue and end the story tragically?”

Examples

A quick example

I’m making this up on the spot, to show you how applying this framework quickly leads to interesting stories.

I want to write a story about the virtue of generosity. The flaw, the lack of that virtue, is greed.

Okay, so our hero is greedy. We start the story showing how they own a beautiful, successful farm. They should be perfectly content. But … they want more. More money, more land, more food.

(Notice how the story never literally says the hero is greedy. It is shown, through the first scene. Additionally, a farm is obviously a more “natural” environment than, say, an office building.)

Where would a challenger come from? What is threatened by always wanting more? The land around the farm. Maybe it’s surrounded by a forest, in which a creature lives. (Or, if you want to mostly stay away from the fantastical, a human tribe that hides from the rest of the world.)

The hero goes into the forest, destroying it, working very hard to expand their farm.

The challenger is encountered. Their existence is a problem. At first, they don’t even need to fight back. The hero is at odds with them because he wants their land, but they are on that land!

The hero has the chance to back down, they don’t. They press on. This prompts the creature to create a curse which automatically latches onto whoever trespasses through their lands. (“All the hero had to do to prevent this bad fate, is stop trying to claim more territory.”) Obviously, the hero visits and receives the curse.

What curse? Something directly related to the flaw of greediness. Something terribly simple that hits right at the central question. Maybe “all food you eat that you don’t need, becomes poisonous”. Or “for every tree you cut, a part of your own farm dies”.

The curse forces the hero to change their ways, otherwise they die or lose their farm. They must learn to live a more balanced life, to not want more than they need.

The third time they go deep into the forest and meet the creature, they’ve learned their lesson. The curse is lifted, the hero helps regrow the part of the forest that was lost, and they promise never to expand.

Alternatively, the hero never learns and they die or lose their farm (and the associated wealth or power).

A bad example

In 2022, Disney released a rather abysmal Pinocchio movie.

Pinocchio itself is a great example of a folktale. He is “cursed”: his nose grows longer whenever he lies. A very simple and visual way to show the flaw of the hero and punish them for it. (Also, later in the film, he is turned into a donkey for lying and breaking rules. Another idea of cursing the main character as a challenge to their flaws.)

But in that movie, Disney merely uses it as a good thing! For example, he lies on purpose to grow his nose, which allows him to grab the keys to his prison cell and escape.

This is a deadly sin, to me, when it comes to folktales.

• They introduce a flaw and a challenge. (Great!)
• They do nothing with it, then pretend it was a virtue all along. (What?)
• The story ends ignoring this curse altogether. (Huh?)

It’s a shame. Disney use to be really good at folktale-type animated movies. Now that you know the structure, you can find it in any of the older Disney classics.

Daedalus & Icarus

Take the myth of Daedalus & Icarus. To escape their imprisonment, Daedalus built wings from wax, so that him and his son could fly away. But he warned him: “fly too low and the sea will make the wax wet, fly too high and the sun will melt the wax”.

It worked! They flew away, with a beautiful view of Crete. But Icarus became overconfident. He flew higher and higher, until his wings melted, and he plunged into the sea—and drowned.

The flaw here is arrogance (in success) or overconfidence. The challenge is flying (using wax wings) without getting too eager (going too high) or too lazy (dropping too low). In this case, the “challenger” is the natural environment.

Orpheus & Eurydice

Another great myth. Orpheus and Eurydice were deeply in love, until the suddenly died. Orpheus could not accept this, so he traveled to the Hades in the underworld, and asked his wife back.

He moved Hades to compassion (through playing a beautiful song, as Orpheus could). Hades made a special deal: “I will let Eurydice follow you back to the land of the living, but only if you walk in front and don’t look back until you’ve left the underworld”

Orpheus was happy and took the deal. As he continued walking, however, he could not hear Eurydice’s footsteps. Eager to see her again, or thinking he’d been fooled by the gods, just before reaching the end … he looked back. Eurydice was right behind him, and now she was lost forever.

The flaw here is impatience or lack of trust. (The corresponding virtue obviously being patience and trust.) The challenge is that simple “rule” set by Hades, the challenger.

Example from my own work

As explained before, my Saga of Life aims to read like folktales.

For example, the very first story is a (creation) Myth. It explains how the gods came to this planet and terraformed it to get the first life. It explains how something came to be!

Almost all stories are Fables. I purposely chose to tell life’s history through animals, with humans only appearing at the final time periods. Because this is actually what happened: humans are very, very recent in the history of life on earth. Additionally, most stories have some clear message about “life”.

When I’m not doing that, the story is often a Legend. You follow a main character who, through adversity, rises to the occasion and becomes a hero (a “legend”). Those stories revolve around extraordinary circumstances in which the hero makes a really tough decision.

I’ll give one short example. Then I think you’ve seen enough. This is the 5th story (“The Turtle Town”):

• The hero has a flaw: they are so curious and eager for information, that they ignore everything else.
• Then comes the challenge: they meet somebody who is knowledgeable and can help discover secrets. They do everything he asks, happy with the collaboration.
• But then it turns out they’ve been helping him do something terrible. (He aims to wake up ancient creatures to dominate the world.)
• Along the way, the hero has lost support of all his friends and family, focused on unraveling the secret of his mysterious “turtle town”.
• So now the hero must overcome the flaw, learn to think for themselves and put limits on their curiosity. They must fight their mentor and work hard to get their life back.
• When all this is over, one of the ancient creatures (a gigantic turtle) is actually awoken. They float to the surface and create an island: this story explains how that island came into existence, which returns in later stories.
• Similarly, the story ends with the turtles being split into two types: turtles and tortoises. (Yes, these are different animals, one is a sea creature and one a land creature!) This story “explains” how those two species came to be.

Why folktales are fantasy

Folktales are almost exclusively fantasy, with some magic, or talking animal, or god involved. Why?

The magic (even in tiny doses) allows us to talk about human nature much more efficiently

The magic allows you to create a plot that uniquely challenges your hero. You’re not dragged down by all the complexities of real life. You don’t have to search for a convoluted challenge through realistic means.

No, just invent one curse that highlights the hero’s flaw precisely. Simple as that.

This is why it saddens me when people decide that “they don’t like unrealistic stories” and will never read or watch something resembling fantasy again. Our oldest stories, famous folktales, the great Greek myths—they are all fantasy. Because a bit of magic or extraordinary rules, makes the story much stronger.

Final remarks

The previous chapter (Rule of Three) is also applicable here. Almost all folktales provide the challenge to the hero in threes. They dramatically fail the first one. Angry, they go out to meet their challenger, and fail the second one. Only at the third challenge do they realize what they were doing was wrong, and they overcome the flaw.

The hero doesn’t know they are being tested. Obviously, they do not think anything is wrong with them. Otherwise they’d already be aware of their flaw and might have even fixed it.

Folktales can be incredibly simple and predictable, and still work. People are interested if the hero wins and how it happens. Because it relates to our daily life. We all encounter challenges and challengers, flaws in our own character, and we enjoy stories because they give us hope we can overcome them.

Many many folktales, however, do end badly. To show “this is what happens if you don’t work hard to overcome the flaw”. This is not a situation of “well, I guess good will win in the end, as always”. Folktales are deeply rooted in exploring human virtues and vices, including all the bad stuff that comes with it.

If you don’t want your message to completely revolve around some “moral lesson” or “obvious message”, shift the focus mostly to growth and exploration. Explore the virtue or flaw to see if it holds up to scrutiny. Make the character grow because of the challenge, instead of entirely changing them into some perfect moralist.

Now write!

Write a folktale!

Remember everything I’ve explained. Include the four elements, keep it simple and focused on that one universal truth you’re exploring. Use a little bit of magic to make the story efficient and stronger. Find ways to make the challenger specific and physical, as that allows much more interesting plot. If possible, keep the folktale rooted in nature and natural elements.

It probably helps to narrow the folktale to one specific subcategory before you write.

It might also help to phrase the four elements as questions.

• Virtue: what (positive) trait do I want to explore? What is relevant in my life or in the lives of many others?
• Flaw: which negative trait or behavior does my hero possess, related to the virtue. (Sometimes the virtue is turned into a flaw by taking it to an extreme, instead of opposing it.)
• Challenger: who forces the hero to act? How can I design them to automatically fight the hero, just through their existence or personality? (And how do I add an air of mystery, magic and naturalness?)
• Challenge: how can I make the challenge as specific, physical and interesting as possible? At what location does it happen? What objects are important? What are the “rules” of this world? (It helps to focus on 1–3 crucial parts, no more. That would stopt the folktale from being simple.)

Or, if you prefer thinking in terms of conflict:

• The flaw is the internal conflict of the hero (which leads to the challenge)
• The challenge is the external conflict of the hero (that forces them to resolve the internal conflict)

Now write! Enjoy the power of the simple folktale!