Fairy Tale Cliches

I am writing a fairy tale and I am trying to collect as many fairy tale cliches as I can. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thank you!

Do ypu mean cliches like things happens 3 times, they lived happy ever after (that's kind a falktales) or do you mean weel known storys like the ugly Duckling or the three little pigs? (I dont know what they are know as in an international plan, but that's what I call them) ?

I meant the first type. I'm trying to combine as many of the cliches as possible into one fractured fairy tale. Opps, I meant to say fractured fairy tale in the original post and must have forgotten.

I'd go with getting lost in the woods. What happens in those woods I'd like to know.

Do any fairy tales take place outside of forests or castles? Any in swamps or meadows or beaches or other forms of wild land?

Fairy god mothers. And curses. And sleeping princesses. All very cliche. Oh, and the perfect prince who's only job in life is apparently to go find sleeping/captured princesses and wake/free them, then marry them.

Prince Charmings a Morman apparently.

There was a huge long thread in here on that once. Someone else was doing the same thing. I'm not sure where that thread is, but it would probably be a lot of use to you. It could have been last year, in which case you'd have to search the archived forums.

Don't forget that your prince can't have a name! He simply has to be Prince Charming

Every stepmother/father has to be evil, even if the stepchild's parent married them and they were aware of that fact.

Don't work for wishes. Work for yourself and you won't need wishes.

That was the message of quite a few fairy tales of Sweden. Either the wish goes unused since you can get what you want in a mundane way, or the rigamarole required to earn it would have easily replaced the need for the wish since you would have already gotten what you wanted by being forced to make it.

Interestingly, before the Brothers Grimm, a lot of the fairy tales had the mother, not stepmother, being the evil protagonist, but the Grimms felt that it wasn't acceptable to set up a blood relation as a target of that sort of hatred.

The Fairy Godmother element didn't really come in until Charles Perrault, who re-wrote a lot of tales for the entertainment of the nobility in the courts of 16th Century-ish France. The Grimms stories often contained stories of mainly pious and religious heroines. Cinderella for the Grimms, for example, prays to God every day as her mother taught her to, and her salvation comes in the form of a tree she planted on her mother's grave.

You can read a lot of fairy tales as showing a lot of influence from the old Hagiographies and Passions from the Saints - the women are pious and diligent and most importantly, obedient, whilst remaining virginal and otherwise passive.

Often this led to many bad situations - older versions of Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty both include a nice amount of rape, whilst another version of Sleeping Beauty (I think it's that one) includes a flagrant display of attempted cannibalism.

I looked at fairy tales as part of my dissertation, so if you've got any questions about the versions from Perrault or the Grimms, or perhaps how they reflected the culture of their times to develop into tropes, feel free to drop me a NaNo Mail!