Contrary to the popular notion that fantasy is an escape from reality, every story I write must enable me to explore life questions that interest me. The whole point of writing a story is to allow myself to find out what I think, all the more so when the story I am about to write is to be inspired by a fairytale, for these old tales express themselves and work most strongly through the subconscious. For that reason, I wanted to choose a fairytale that plucked deep chords within me.

Rumpelstiltskin was among the fairytales that resonated, though it was not first on my list. But the thing about writing is that no matter how good and clear your intentions, how deep and brilliant your aims, a story can live or die in the main character or, more importantly, in the voice of the main character. For me, finding that voice is profoundly important. I set aside one fairytale after another because none of the voices was vivid or visceral or original enough to captivate me, so how would it ever capture a reader? The first person who must be interested in a piece is its creator.

Finally I came to Rumpelstiltskin. The thing that always struck me about this fairytale was the unfairness of it. I felt this dissatisfaction again when I read the original. Indeed the strength of my irritation told me the story was definitely getting to me.

I read the story closely.

The girl who is the main character – the miller’s daughter in more than one version – is surrounded by knaves. Her father lies about her being able to spin gold from straw in order to win himself prestige. He must be a fool as well as a liar to lie to the king. That the mother does not protest means she is weak or foolish or under the thumb of her husband, or that she does not care for her daughter. She is not a character who features in the original, but the weakness of mothers and the effect this has on daughters and their characters is territory I often visit, and doubt I will ever exhaust.

The fact that the father is a liar and risks his daughter interested me too, because whatever my own father’s failings, he died when I was too young to see him as anything but a hero. So while as a woman grown I recognise his flaws, the little girl in me forgives him everything. The father in the story may be many things but his daughter will go on loving him and her mother both, while fully aware of their weaknesses.

These thoughts were beginning to form the character of the girl.

The king in the story is a proud, greedy man who locks the girl in a room full of straw and commands her to spin it into gold as her father boasted she could do, or her head will be chopped off. Caught between the stupidity of her father and the greed of the king, if greed it is, the girl is helpless. She would not be helpless, I reflected, if she denounced her father as a liar, but she would no more consider this than I considered not letting my father in after my mother locked him out when he came home late after a night’s drinking. So the girl in the story is morally superior to her father and the king, because she will not appease one by sacrificing the other. In fact, her moral superiority is the reason she is helpless.

The third man who appears in the story – Rumpelstiltskin – offers to help the girl spin the straw into gold, but at a price. There is a slyness to the dwarf, for the bargain he strikes is to spin the straw into gold for a trinket worn by the hapless girl. But if Rumpelstiltskin can spin straw into gold, what need has he of a trinket? His true desire is concealed. The fact that the girl does not wonder at the dwarf’s motives might suggest that foolishness runs in the family, but I felt my character was desperate rather than foolish: the alternative to accepting his proposal is, after all, beheading. Naturally the king’s greed is inflamed by the girl’s apparent success, so he commands her to spin a ballroom full of straw into gold.

At this point I wondered whether the king had believed all along that the miller’s daughter could spin straw into gold. I assumed that he had not believed it to begin with, which meant he had summoned the daughter in order to expose the father’s boast. Perhaps he thought that the father would admit the lie when his daughter’s life was at stake. If so, the king must have been dismayed when the daughter was delivered up like a lamb to the slaughter. If he had less pride and more humanity, he would have denounced the father, or if he had wanted a harsher revenge, he might have held the father accountable for his daughter’s success or failure. Instead, he tells the daughter she will lose her head if she fails to make good her father’s boast.

Would the king really have chopped off the hapless girl’s head if she had failed? The story does not reveal this, so I had to guess. It would take a dreadful and macabre courage to be so vile, I decided, and this king seemed more venal than deep to me. Besides, he is a snob, which means he cares what people think, ergo he would not have had her beheaded. He might, however, have her consigned to the dungeons and then forget about her. It struck me, too, that the king would have been a good deal more interesting as a character if he had yearned for something more than money, which is surely the dullest of all desires. A person who wants only money has the soul of an accountant. And the accountant king certainly desires wealth and expects it when he proposes the second night of spinning.

The dwarf appears to the girl again – from where, I wondered, and how, and most of all why? Once again he asks for only a trinket as payment and transforms the ballroom of straw into gold by dawn, whereupon the king proposes a third night of spinning. This time there is an entire barn of straw to transform into gold. The dwarf arrives but the girl has no more jewellery to offer. When the dwarf names her firstborn child as his price for the final task, I was immediately certain that he had always planned to ask for the child, and that if the girl had not run out of trinkets, he would have spurned whatever she offered.

She agrees to the bargain, thinking that life is sweet and anything might happen before she has to pay such a price. At this point the child in question is an abstraction, and if our heroine refuses to pay the price, she will die. If she agrees to the price, she will live, and where there is life there is hope. My heroine was modest and optimistic but also pragmatic, I decided.

When the last straw is spun into gold, the king is satisfied and he marries the girl even though she is only a commoner. I took the liberty of doubting his greed would ever really be satisfied. Far more likely that the king marries the girl because, with such an unlikely and spectacular talent, she is a veritable golden goose to be kept close to hand. Why else would he marry her? After all, he was not moved to pity or mercy or even justice when he threatened to behead her, nor did he learn to love her for her courage or cleverness.

We are not told what the girl feels. She is not asked by her father or the king if she wants to marry. I pondered possible motives. Is she so relieved to be alive that she does not mind marrying a greedy self-centred boor of a man? Or does she, like many foolish young women, think that she can change, or heaven forfend, improve the man? Is she a gold-digger who sees marriage to a king as a leg-up socially? Suddenly I realised that it was pointless looking for reasons, because she has not been given the choice. My character – pragmatic and modest in her desires and hopes, sensible of the limitations of people around her, seldom judging those people – would have accepted that she must wed the king if he had the right to command it; she would do so without making a fuss. After her dealings with the three men in the story, she is unlikely to have many illusions about men. Nor is she already in love: had her lover existed, he would have been yet a fourth worthless man, since he makes no effort to rescue her.

In time, she bears a child to the king. For me, the birth of my daughter was the discovery that I, who had always felt myself to be rather cool and lacking in passion, had an abyss of love in me. So, it was easy for me to imagine that the young mother in the story, caught in a loveless marriage, would be as profoundly affected as I was. I could picture her with that no-longer-abstract firstborn lying soft and impossibly light in her arms, its pearly blue-blind gaze causing a fist of love to close painfully around her heart. Then there is a flash of ruby light and Rumpelstiltskin is standing on the hearth, demanding his payment. Her baby. She would be devastated and utterly repelled by the idea of handing it over to the dwarf. What would he do with a baby, after all? Make a pet of it? Turn it into a slave? Eat it?

No wonder she weeps, and lo and behold, so the story goes, the dwarf pities her and offers her one chance to keep her baby. Only she must tell the dwarf his name. Is it pity, though, that moves the dwarf, since he is certain that she will never guess his name? I think not. He was sly to begin with and now there is to be a sadistic little entrée to the main course of pain he means to serve up to this young woman, who is now a mother and a queen.

I noticed that she did not turn for help to the child’s father, the king, nor to her parents, who have proven their inadequacy. A certain sort of woman would have crumpled into a terrified heap, incapacitated by terror and remorse, but I was never the sort for histrionics in the face of disaster and neither is my heroine. She has the courage to hope, and she makes lists of names and offers them to the dwarf as she awaits the return of her faithful servant whom she has sent to search for the name she needs. Luck comes to those who have the courage to hope, I believe, and so I have no trouble accepting that the diligent and faithful servant stumbled on the isolated campsite of the dwarf and saw him dancing a vicious triumphant gloating jig, singing out his name.

The nameless servant is the only man in the story who is neither knave nor fool, and yet he is only a stalwart auxiliary character, never named. He deserves better, I decided, as does the queen. The latter exacts her own small revenge by guessing wrong a few times during her final appointment with the dwarf, but then she tells the dwarf his true name and Rumpelstiltskin is destroyed by his own rage.

My story would go a little differently. I began to write, and immediately Moth stood up and brushed off her dress, pushing the wings of her pale smooth bob behind her ears, listening to her father’s bluster. She was, from the first, the perfect character – fully formed, pragmatic, sweet-natured, kind and brave. I loved her voice and trusted her to travel wisely and truthfully along the road this story would spin for her.