What All Writers Can Learn from Folktales (Writing Exercise)

Diane Callahan
12 min readJul 19, 2022
The title text “Writing Lessons from Folktales” is overlaid on a Warwick Goble illustration of Beauty and the Beast, with a beautiful woman looking down at a man with the head of a beast.

“The spirit of the woods — the Bwca. I saw him once, when I was a child . . . He can look like whatever he wants to. But his true form is a sharp-eared thing, a hairy thing, a little like an old man and a little like a child, with a snout of a nose and paws for hands. If he likes you, he’ll help you. If he doesn’t like you, he’ll make your life a misery.”

“The Bwca” is Daniel Morden’s telling of a Welsh folktale. Like the mythical hobs or brownies, the Bwca will gladly do chores while humans sleep if rewarded with food — or, in this story, milk.

Cover of “Weird Tales from the Storyteller” by Daniel Morden with an image of a creepy-looking gray creature (the bwca) with blond tufts of hair carrying buckets over his shoulders.

Folktales like this can ignite our imaginations and reveal facets of human nature. Fairy tales, fables, legends, and myths are related categorizations that fall under the folklore umbrella.

--

--