5 Questions with Aya Ling
I can’t help but love fairy tale retellings. Aya Ling feels the same way! She’s written multiple series’ each with a fairy tale twist. Check out our reviews of the gender bending Reversed Retellings and why she loves writing them!
1. As a writer of YA fairy tale retellings and fantasy, what draws you to certain fairy tales to revisit as an author?
I don't think there's a certain rule. A Little Mermaid was the answer to a "What if" question--what if the little mermaid was never in love with the prince and wanted desperately to get back home? I wrote The Reversed Retellings just because I thought it'd be fun to see how women would play the role normally given to the prince/hero. Enspelled was inspired by the villainess isekai genre in webtoons/manga. Usually, a modern girl gets reincarnated into a novel she's read, as the villainess who ends up getting killed, so she has to work hard to survive. Which made me think, hey, in Goose Girl the maid also is killed in the end, so why not use this story for my own take on the villainess genre? The Ugly Stepsister is the strangest of all--I happen to have a Cinderella book with a torn first page, and I had a scene of a girl arguing with a prince over poor children in my head, and somehow, more ideas grew from there and formed the story!
2. In your Reversed Retelling series, you took classic fairy tales and switched the gender roles, featuring stories like the 12 Dancing Princesses, Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty, really it's such a fun theme to play with, can you tell us a little about what you try to explore in each retelling?
It's definitely a fun premise! As I mentioned in Q.1, I thought it'd be fun to see what happens when the woman has to save the day. So the soldier in The Twelve Dancing Princesses is replaced by a shoe cobbler who volunteers for money, the Beast becomes a woman who resembles a demon, and the prince in Sleeping Beauty becomes a disabled mage. However, once I started writing, I discovered the stories were way more difficult than I imagined! The biggest challenge was making Book 2 & Book 3 adhere to the fairy tales, yet also solve the problems left from Book 1. Marissa Meyer executed this beautifully with her Lunar Chronicle series, but when I tried it myself…it was TOUGH! If I could start over, I'd keep the books in the same world, but make them independent stories that can be read out of order.
3. Another series, Unfinished Tales, focuses on Kat being pulled into the world of Cinderella, but not always as the traditional heroine of the story. This series then morphs into a fantasy series of its own. How do you think about the balance between retelling and diverging into wholly new stories? Is it ever purely one or the other?
Actually, The Ugly Stepsister was originally meant to be a standalone. But after so many complaints about the ending, plus I got an idea that could work for the sequel, I ended up writing a whopping four subsequent books lol. While the sequels didn't follow any fairy tale, I always included a social issue for each book (education, class, pollution). I liked how the main characters worked together to reduce child labor in the first book and wanted to continue the theme. But apart from the social issues, there is always the conflict of the heroine's more egalitarian values with the hero's rigid Victorian aristocratic mind, so the Cinderella element is still loosely tied in. With Cinderella, it’s quite simple to work the original fairy tale into a romance-centered story, while others like The Twelve Dancing Princesses would require more effort when using the original tale's framework.
4. Besides fairy tale retellings, your author profile highlights a love for anime, can you share some of your favorites?
I started out falling in love with Japanese anime/manga since childhood. Some of my favorites include Fruits Basket, Rurouni Kenshin, Prince of Tennis (I've even written fanfiction for it!), and more recently I really enjoy Kimetsu no Yaiba and am eagerly awaiting the second season. I also discovered the enthralling world of Korean webtoons last year. My current favorite is See you in my 19th Life and pray that a K-drama could be adapted from it.
5. Already having covered so many fantasy and fairy tale worlds, can you tell us what's up next for you?
My next book will be a portal fantasy, about a modern girl who is engaged to a fae prince and tries to get out of it. Kind of similar to Danielle L. Jensen's Stolen Songbird which I absolutely love, but of course I've got my own take. I also have an idea for another Beauty and Beast retelling/isekai story, which means it'll also be about a modern girl dropped into a totally different magical world! You can see I'm a fan of this premise : )
More about the Author
Aya is from Taiwan, where she struggles daily to contain her obsession with mouthwatering and unhealthy foods. Often she will devour a good book instead. Her favorite books include martial arts romances, fairy tale retellings, high fantasy, cozy mysteries, and manga.
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Books we’ve reviewed:
