Jack and the Beanstalk

This Tale belonged to Lena from the very beginning, i.e. the very same night I had the idea for the Ever Afters series. The idea that sparked the story is: what if there’s an afterschool that trains young fairy tale characters and the new girl has some sort of totally new fairy tale that throws the other fairy tales off their usual tracks?

I also knew:

• The new girl would be the main character, and she would have two best friends, one girl and one boy.

• The girl best friend would be super smart and talented at books. She would get along with the main character from the beginning.

• The boy best friend would be extremely athletic and talented at fighting. He would not get along with the main character at first.

• In the first book, the girl best friend would get her own fairy tale, and both the main character and the boy main character would join her. The retelling of that story would be the jumping off point for the book’s main conflict.

 If you are wondering how I knew all these elements would be in the books, all but the last one are all tropes for middle grade books: a trio of characters, one that gets along and one that doesn’t, etc. A trope is a pattern in a certain genre that is already so well-established that the audience expects to see that element in some way, though you may enjoy a twist. Kind of like when you make mac and cheese, you need pasta and cheese, but you might decide to have a special kind of pasta or your favorite kind of cheese or even add some bacon to make it fancy, but if you skip the pasta and the cheese altogether, you have made a dish other than mac and cheese.

 Middle grade almost always has a main character who has a relationship with other kids: sometimes siblings or cousins, sometimes friends. I chose a trio of friends, because that was a dynamic I enjoyed in the works of my creative elders: J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series with Harry, Ron, and Hermione and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series with Percy, Annabeth, and Grover.

So, with the friendship framework established, I needed a fairy take for the first book, so I could create a plot around it. I searched around for a fairy tale that was so well known most of my readers would know it well but so action-oriented that it would feel like a real adventure. “Cinderella” would have satisfied the first requirement but not the second. “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” would satisfy the second requirement, but even though it’s one of my favorite fairy tales of all time, few people have heard of it.

So, I settled pretty quickly on “Jack and the Beanstalk.” It wasn’t the most comfortable fit for the bookish best friend, but I knew that mismatch had a lot of comic potential.

I actually had committed to this Tale way before I knew any of the main characters’ names. In fact, “Jack and the Beanstalk” influenced Lena’s name. “Jacqueline and the Beanstalk” would be too obvious—it would spoil the plot. But Lena as a nickname for “Jacqueline” would work, and it would be fun to reveal that at the end. Plus, “Lena” is a great name for a best friend—she’s always been someone Rory can “lean on.”

(I seriously thought that, and I am 100% corny like that too. Ben Taylor gets it from somewhere.) 

Rapunzel

This Tale also belonged to Lena—almost from the very beginning, i.e. roughly the same week I had the initial idea for the Ever Afters series. Rory, the main character, needed a mentor. The series needed a way to get some prophesies that no one understood and/or believed (another fairy tale trope present in both Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, with roots in Greek myth, including Homer’s The Iliad with the seer Cassandra).

Pretty quickly, I settled on Rapunzel as both Rory’s mentor and the source of prophecy. I thought it would be funny if everyone knew she was a seer but thought she’d gone a bit crazy in her tower (for that, I need to credit Donna Jo Napoli’s Zel, though the tone of that novel isn’t humorous). I also knew that Rory and Rapunzel would have a really solid and believable bond if Rory understood Rapunzel more than anyone else.

There was a catch to this set-up: in fairy tales, most mentors die, allowing the hero or heroine to rely on the mentor’s wisdom and then grow beyond that dependence after the mentor’s passing. This is an idea Joseph Campbell discussed in detail in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a highly influential book from the 1940’s which was republished as The Hero’s Journey in the 1990’s. I read it in college—for funsies, because I knew many stories I knew relied on its structure. For example, regarding the death of the mentor, consider how the death of Dumbledore affected Harry Potter and how the death of Obi-Wan Kenobi affected Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.

So, yes, from a fairy tale perspective, Rapunzel had to go, but there had to be a good reason. Sacrificing herself for someone else that Rory loved seemed like a good option. For example, if Rapunzel sacrificed herself for Lena because they both had the same Tale, that had a lot of narrative potential.  

When I started drafting Of Giants and Ice, I didn’t know how exactly Rapunzel would sacrifice herself for Lena. I just knew it would involve a shared Tale, so I started seeding that possibility from the very beginning. That’s why Lena wears a whole bunch of thin box braids, which otherwise makes little sense. That hairstyle can cost hundreds of dollars, and part of the impetus for Lena’s Jack and the Beanstalk Tale is her family running low on cash. (In my headcanon, Madame Benne had an invention for this—a magic comb that braided hair, which Lena’s grandmother inherited as a family heirloom and Lena used often in order to feel closer to her ancestor.)