ABSTRACT
In an environment of increasing strategies for creative writing “lessons” with varying degrees of constraints – ideas like the writing prompt, flash fiction, and “uncreative” writing – one overlooked idea is to work with folktale types and motifs in order to create a story outline. This article sketches how such a lesson might be constructed, beginning with the selection of a tale type for the broad arc of the story, then moving to the range of individual motifs which might be available to populate that arc. Advanced students might further consider using the parallel and chiastic structures of folktale to sophisticate their outline. The example used here – and suggested for use – is a folktale which informs both Beowulf and The Hobbit and which, therefore, is likely at least to a certain extent to be familiar to many writers. Even if the outline which this exercise generates were never used to write a full story, the process remains useful in thinking about the building blocks of story and traditional structures such as the archetypal “Hero’s Journey.”

KEY WORDS
Folktale; motif; recipe-based creative writing; Beowulf; Tolkien