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Stress has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you least expect it, but how you respond is only half the battle. The secret to winning the war against stress lies in what you do when you aren't working (and presumably aren't stressed).

While I have a hobby that I engage in regularly (surfing), it isn't the antidote to stress you might think. Think about it: even if you have a hobby that you're deeply passionate about, you aren't going to spend more than 10% of your time outside of work doing it. It's what you do with the other 90% that really matters.

You need structure to use this other 90% wisely. Otherwise, you'll fall into bad habits that can magnify your stress, rather than alleviate it. I structure my time by religiously following 10 rules when I'm not working.

These rules work wonders with one limitation: they don't work quite as well if you work too much. Sure, we're all busy, but if you're putting in 80-90 hour weeks, you won't have the energy or focus to use your time outside of work wisely.

No time to exercise during the week? You have 48 hours every weekend to make it happen. Getting your body moving for as little as 10 minutes releases GABA, a soothing neurotransmitter that reduces stress. Exercise is also a great way to come up with new ideas. Innovators and other successful people know that being outdoors often sparks creativity.

Weekly reflection is a powerful tool for improvement. Use the weekend to contemplate the larger forces that are shaping your industry, your organization, and your job. Without the distractions of Monday to Friday busy work, you should be able to see things in a whole new light. Use this insight to alter your approach to the coming week, improving the efficiency and efficacy of your work.

The weekend is a great time to spend a few moments planning your upcoming week. As little as 30 minutes of planning can yield significant gains in productivity and reduced stress. The week feels a lot more manageable when you go into it with a plan because all you have to focus on is execution.

Dr. Travis Bradberry is the award-winning co-author of the #1 bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and the cofounder of TalentSmart, the world's leading provider of emotional intelligence tests and training, serving more than 75% of Fortune 500 companies. His bestselling books have been translated into 25 languages and are available in more than 150 countries. Dr. Bradberry has written for, or been covered by, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Harvard Business Review.

If you'd like to learn how to increase your emotional intelligence (EQ), consider taking the online Emotional Intelligence Appraisal test that's included with the Emotional Intelligence 2.0 book. Your test results will pinpoint which of the book's 66 emotional intelligence strategies will increase your EQ the most.

Listing the features of fairy tales in the way above, you can probably can see the different ways fairy tales overlap with other modes of storytelling. The normalized magic and intuitive logic is present in magical realism. The non-setting is present in a lot of weird fiction. And the open artifice and flatness is a frequent feature of postmodern fiction and metafiction.

Great post! Your comment re: "flatness of character" reminds me of how Scott McCloud talks about character detail in Understanding Comics. In many comics and graphic novels, especially for kids, the hero/protagonist is drawn in a cartoon-ish style with few details, whereas the villain might be very detailed. Scott's theory is that we can "see ourselves" more easily in a character made of just a few lines, and we are more likely to "other" a character who is drawn in great detail. He argues that the most universal character in comics-language is the smiley face, which can be a stand-in for us all.

An interesting viewpoint! I spend a lot of time writing fairy tales, both rewriting traditional ones and assembling new ones out of pieces, so of course I have a bunch of "but what about xyz?" (for instance, in my reading fairy tales are almost all didactic, which is another departure from standard advice) but it's very interesting to see the form contrasted with traditional literary advice.

I do wish more people in the writing / writing advice world would be willing to take this kind of thoughtful, critical look at the world's traditional oral traditions. They are the bedrock of all fiction-- including fantasy, yes, but also literary realism, mystery, romance and everything else.

I often start my MFA courses with a discussion of fairy tales. It seems an obvious place to start, since fairy tales are some of humanity\u2019s oldest stories and likely the first stories that my students remember reading as children. But I also love starting with fairy tales because they violate more or less every single rule of fiction writing that is drilled into us in creative writing classes.

Instead of \u201Cshow don\u2019t tell,\u201D fairy tales prioritize telling over showing. Instead of demanding \u201Cround characters,\u201D fairy tales embrace flat ones. Instead of logical \u201Cworldbuilding,\u201D fairy tales operate with a surreal dream logic in abstract settings. Instead of starting \u201Cin media res,\u201D they start \u201Conce upon a time.\u201D Instead of \u201Ctelling the story only you can tell,\u201D fairy tales ask you to retell stories that have been told for centuries. So on and so forth.

Almost nothing you are taught about setting, character, voice, or structure in MFA classes or craft essays applies to the fairy tale form. And yet the form endures. Fairy tales still serve as source material for many of our novels and movies, and plenty of acclaimed contemporary writers deploy versions of the form. (I\u2019m currently reading Kelly Link\u2019s forthcoming story collection, White Cat, Black Dog, which opens with a terrific modern fairy tale.)

I\u2019m not suggesting that the traditional writing advice is wrong, per se. Plenty of brilliant stories are written with all the usual advice. But we should always remember that there are no writing \u201Crules,\u201D there are only standards that apply to certain modes of storytelling. Those modes wax and wane in popularity. They chance according to culture and history. And there are infinite modes we can choose from.

So what is the mode of the fairy tale? What is the form? Here I defer to Kate Bernheimer, a great contemporary scholar (and writer) of fairy tales who outlines four qualities in her essay \u201CFairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairytale.\u201D (The essay can be found in the Tin House\u2019s The Writer\u2019s Notebook, which I highly recommend as a craft book.) The four qualities Bernheimer describes are:

Flatness\u2014specifically flatness of character. Fairy tales don\u2019t delve into the psychology or interiority of characters, and typically limit them to one or two adjectives. The beautiful princess. The evil king. Etc. Similarly, fairy tales don\u2019t have traditional character arcs or worry about \u201Cdynamic characters.\u201D The evil witch at the start is probably going to be an evil witch at the end.

Abstraction\u2014a general minimalism of description. Only a few colors are used and details are abstracted. \u201CA young woman lived in a small house by the dark woods,\u201D rather than a detailed layout of the house and a catalogue of the the types of trees in the forest.

Normalized magic\u2014probably self-explanatory: magic is normalized. Characters are unsurprised if a cat begins to talk or a mermaid swims by. There is no SFF worldbuilding to explain or rationalize the fantastic elements.

Open artifice\u2014fairy tales eschew the standard methods of hiding fictional artifice and instead present themselves as pure story. As yarn, joke, fable. Fairy tale narrators often interject commentary or address the reader. And the classic fairy tale frame tells us we\u2019re entering and then leaving pure story. These days, the classic frame has been reduced to \u201COnce upon a time\u2026\u201D and \u201C\u2026happily ever after.\u201D In traditional fairy tales, the openings and closings were even more overt in telling you \u201Cthis isn\u2019t real\u201D: \u201COnce there was, there never was\u201D to start, say, and something absurd like the following to close: \u201CI was also there in my red trousers and ate a lentil on a spit and if that lentil fits on the spit then you also have to believe my tale.\u201D

A non-setting\u2014fairy tales typically take place in a vague non-setting, in which we are never pinned down in specific time periods or locations. \u201COnce upon a time a beautiful princess lived in a golden castle\u201D instead of \u201CIn the 12th century, the heir to the Hapsburg dynasty lived in a castle by the Aar river\u201D or what not. Specific names, dates, and locations\u2014whether real or invented\u2014deflate the fairy tale mode.

Although Americans raised on Brothers Grimm might think of this non-setting as being always a vague medieval world, the non-setting can take place any time (so to speak) including far future science fiction settings or the present day as long as we don\u2019t pin the setting down too neatly. \u201COnce upon a time a lonely salesman lived in a big city and every day he took a taxi to work\u2026\u201D perhaps, but not \u201CIn 2023, an NFT salesmen lived in the Fisherman\u2019s Wharf district of San Francisco and every day he took an Uber to a Starbucks with his laptop to work.\u201D

These six essential qualities of fairy tales stand out first because they, as said, go against all the standard advice of both contemporary literary fiction and SFF writing. We\u2019re told to be specific in our settings, logical in our worldbuilding, and to probe the psychological depths of our characters. That advice works wonders for many types of stories. But the qualities of fairy tales allow for different types of stories and different effects. Fairy tales in their abstractness, artifice, and flatness allow stories to operate on different planes. The philosophical, sexual, or primal fears. They are somehow both more Apollonian and more Dionysian at the same time.

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