Writing Reflections: Lips as Red as Blood

Well, it’s Saturday once again, folks. I cannot tell you how relieved I am by that, but I’m not here to talk about work, though I could probably spend an entire story ranting at this point. Anyway, I’m here to get my mind off of that and discuss another one of my old works with you. Since I’ve focused on poetry for the past three entries, I figured that I would switch gears and take a look at one of my fiction pieces. With readers wanting me to focus (in development) short story collection on retold fairy tales, I’ve decided that I will analyze my microfiction story “Lips as Red as Blood”, a retelling of “Snow White” told from the Evil Queen’s perspective.

I cannot include the entire story here, but I have included the link to the original story below so that you can read it yourself.

Now, the best part of this story, in my opinion, is its concept. I got the idea for it from this line from the original Grimm tale, “Soon afterward she had a little daughter who was as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as ebony wood, and therefore they called her Little Snow-White” (Grimm 053: Little Snow-White). Of course, I misremembered it and quoted it in my story as “hair as black as coal”, but that was not the part of the line that stood out to me.

“As red as blood” caught my attention—sometimes given as “lips as red as blood”—and stuck with me for a long time. Who would want a child “as red as blood”? Why would she be “as red as blood” and “as white as snow”? Well, to me, that description sounded very familiar: it sounded like a vampire. Thus, the idea of Snow White being a vampire was born.

I almost wrote the story from Snow White’s perspective, to have her as a humanized vampire who hated what she did. Then I realized that we had too many stories like that. What we did not have was a story explaining why the Evil Queen wanted Snow White dead. Yes, we have the explanation that she was vain and just wanted to be the most beautiful woman around, but that hardly produces a three-dimensional character, now does it? But what if the Evil Queen was, in fact, a vampire hunter? Perhaps one still focused a bit on appearances, but a vampire hunter nonetheless. Now, that was an interesting concept.

The choice to have the Evil Queen tell her story from within her cell was a risky one. I could have told it all in flashback form, which could have given me more material to work with, but choosing to keep it all as a confession limited what I could do with the story. Perhaps that was to the story’s detriment. I could not really go in-depth about what happened, but it was more in the tradition of a fairy tale, an oral story passed down from one teller to the next. It also allowed me to go a bit more into how the Evil Queen was feeling, give her a bit more personality, but it did not let me go into Snow White’s side very deeply. Of course, that might have been by design. Just like Snow White does not get much of a stage in the original fairy tale, Snow White does not get much of a voice here. She is the villain in the Evil Queen’s tale—just as she should be.

The greatest weakness of this story, I have to say, is its length. As I said, the story does not go into much more detail than the original story, perhaps even less, given the timeframe that it covers. Again, that was by design, seeing as it was intended to be microfiction. However, it leaves the reader wanting more. In particular, the ending leaves the reader wanting to know whether the Huntsman is really there to free the Evil Queen or to kill her. I left it off because the Evil Queen would no longer be talking to herself after the arrival of the Huntsman, no matter the result, but I see now that that leaves the reader hanging in suspense. Still, I’m not sure if I would change it, a decision I need to make before finalizing the upcoming short story collection (which is still a ways off).

What’s your opinion of “Lips as Red as Blood”? Of microfiction overall? Do you have any microfiction that feels like it should have been fleshed out into a longer piece? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!