Why I should read fairy tales and the classics and kick ass!

Late last night I suddenly remembered that I had a 30-day creative writing challenge to kick off over at my other blog. The first task was to re-write a fairy tale. Off the top of my head I thought about Little Red Riding Hood, but then I realized that story has already been re-told many times. I wanted to pick a little known or unpopular fairy tale so I went to Google and found a long list of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales on Wikipedia. Dammit, I wasn’t familiar with most of them.

Anyway, I looked at the list and picked a somewhat familiar one and read through it quickly. While reading through the story I began to realize that it sounded very similar to one of the books I reviewed a few months back. Holy incapacity, Batman! I just read and reviewed a re-telling of a fairy tale and didn’t even know it! Plus I obviously didn’t do enough research about the book because I don’t remember reading anything mentioning a fairy tale. Gah. I could have said so many things about the book if I knew it was a re-telling of an old twisted tale. (Let’s face it, Grimms’ tales are twisted.)

This is the main reason why I have to read and re-read the original or historical version of fairy tale stories (I’m not talking Disney here). And I have got to get on the classics, too, while I’m at it. I need to be a better book blogger, a better writer, a better reader, a better researcher. I felt so stupid that I didn’t know enough classic stories and that I didn’t do my research.

Other reasons I can think of: 1) the original fairy tales are some of the first horror and/or fantasy stories ever heard of and I can get really twisty ideas from them. Great for writer wannabees like me; and 2) reading and knowing classic novels can help me feign intelligence during discussions. Um, those are all the important reasons I can think of right now. As you can see they’re both valid and completely incorruptible.

So now I’m going to try to read the Grimms’ fairy tales as soon as I finish my current book (I’m reading Other Worlds Than These, by the way! A really awesome anthology of parallel world stories and portal fantasies! More about it soon!), and I’m going to shoot for one classic novel this September (just one porque I went nuts with the blog tours this month). Then starting October I’ll try to alternate between a classic and a non-classic. I’ll also throw in a few fairy or folk tale collections. There are so many!

Sounds like a fabulous I-hope-I-stick-to-it-long-enough plan, yeah? Hah. By the way, I have yet to do that Day 1 task for my creative writing challenge. I was all excited last night, then I felt all “meh” about the fairy tale I initially picked after realizing it was the inspiration for that book I reviewed a while back. I need to pick another fairy tale and finish the damn task! Hah. Hopefully, I’ll do that by end of day today. If I could just stay away from Facebook and Twitter long enough…

So, what are your favorite fairy tales? And any recommendations on which classic novels I start off with? Or I should say, read next because I already started on A Tale of Two Cities a few months ago and I think I’ll get on that first. Anyway, I have tons of classics on my reader so finding one to read shouldn’t be a problem.

Let’s hope I can stick to this plan.