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…