Stories That Inspired My Writing
11th June 2025
The first stories I fell in love with as a child were the Grimm fairytales. I had a leatherbound collection from a charity shop with all the originals in it. I loved how dark they were, but still so delightful, with talking animals, strange riddles, and villains meeting very gruesome ends. My mother used to read them to me when I couldn’t sleep. I remember her reading Rumpelstiltskin and making funny whirring sounds when he spun the straw into gold.
I’ve mentioned Myths & Legends by Anthony Horowitz as one of my biggest inspirations before, and I couldn’t be more right. I first read it when I was ten and immediately fell in love with the way it explained the world. Stories told us why caves echo, or why the seasons change. I especially loved the bittersweet ones, where there was a kind of happy ending, but the characters still ended up a little miserable. I don’t know if enjoy is the right word, but those were always the stories I remembered most.
Some of my favourites were Demeter and Persephone, because I loved thinking of it every time the seasons shifted. I imagined Demeter falling deeper into sorrow as the leaves turned brown. I also loved Echo and Narcissus. Echo’s ending broke my heart. Cursed to repeat the words of others forever. And The Great Bell of Peking is still one of my favourite stories of all time. The sacrifice of the girl, the horror of the bell tolling with a sound that echoed her death, stayed with me. It is a must-read if you like mythic horror.
It is probably why so many of my own stories are bittersweet, and definitely quite sad if you read them back to back. That is why I included a short preface at the start of Honeyed Myths, gently encouraging people to read them like old fairytales, one at a time, perhaps before bed.
What I also loved about mythic stories, especially compared to traditional fairytales, was how complex the characters were. The gods were not always good. They could be vain, greedy, jealous, cruel, and still divine. Their punishments were often awful, and yet their stories were beautiful.
As I got older, I started prowling through charity shops for ragged fairytale books. My favourite of all time is The Girl and the Cowherd, a Chinese myth that is still celebrated each year during the Qixi Festival. It is so whimsical and so tragic, and it directly inspired one of my own favourite stories, The Accidental Immortal.
Other stories inspired me in quieter ways, including my three childhood favourites: Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz, and Alice in Wonderland. All three are magical reads as a child, but I think they deserve a second reading as an adult. There is so much in them I missed when I was younger, too distracted by sword fights and mythical worlds to notice the deeper sadness underneath.
Poetry also shaped me. Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti is my favourite poem of all time. The sapphic undertones were not lost on my fourteen-year-old self. That poem lives in my bones, I swear.
In my adulthood, I have loved the creeping, claustrophobic horror of Shirley Jackson. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is still my favourite book of all time. Merricat (Mary-Catherine), the protagonist, is eerily familiar to me. So much so that I worry Shirley Jackson somehow pulled her gothic, borderline-delusional rose-tinted glasses view of the world directly from my brain. It is a strange read, granted, but a brilliant one. One minute she is burying animal bones and thinking about stepping on the dead bodies of the people she hates, and the next she is in her own little world which she calls her "house on the moon", where people sing in starlight and eat rose petals. Her house on the moon reminded me so much of the fantasy world I created in my head as a child, which I wrote about in my earlier blog post Writing for My Younger Self. If there were a sister novel to Honeyed Myths, it would be We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Stardust by Neil Gaiman is another favourite. The three witches trying to eat a heart for immortality is so genius I am jealous he created it first. If We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the sister to Honeyed Myths, then Stardust is the distant and far superior cousin.
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter actually inspired me to start writing short stories again, after I abandoned them in my late teens. I read it at twenty-two and I still recommend it to everyone I meet. I love novels, but there is something so sharp and sweet about a short story. It is almost concentrated. In a novel, there are standout moments, but it would be overwhelming if every line were quotable. I think it would drain me. That is why I love short stories. They are condensed brilliance and always hit perfectly. Another amazing collection of short stories has to be The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke. I read it because I saw a review that said it was like a crossover of Grimm fairytales and Jane Austen, which felt so perfectly me.
I plan to talk more about this in my next blog post, about what comes next for me and my writing. You see, while I started writing short stories as a child, some of them expanded and grew into novels. A few from Honeyed Myths nearly did. Star-Cross’d, The Thief and the Flute, and Widow’s Fruit all had to be gently trimmed back, because I just wanted to keep worldbuilding with them. Star-Cross'd, a sapphic love story, in particular has always stood out to me as a potential future novel.
Widow’s Fruit, which I will try not to spoil too much before releasing Honeyed Myths, really stuck with me. I do feel the characters in that story are finished, but the world I created was too delicious to leave alone. Its what I am working on next. Naomi Novik’s writing definitely brought that feeling out in me. Spinning Silver and Uprooted are just fantastic, and she is one of my favourite writers of all time. A must-read if you love folklore, romance, and a bit of horror.
These are just some of the stories that shaped me. The ones that sit beside me when I write. Obviously, my dream would be that even one of my stories stood out to someone the way these stories stood out to me. Hey, a girl can dream!
If you have a story, a poem, or a character that has stayed with you, I’d love to hear about it.
Thanks for reading,
Jess x
