Once Upon a Time? What Fairy Tales Teach Novelists About Memory and Writing

Every fairy tale relies on a small set of built-in cues — "once upon a time," "then one day," "until finally," "happily ever after" — that mark the same structural beats every story needs in order to lodge itself in a reader's memory. These cues aren't decorative; they're evidence of a universal "story schema" the human mind uses to store and retrieve stories, and understanding that schema gives authors a direct, practical tool. Chief among these cues is "once upon a time" itself, which functions as an automatic prime that shifts both teller and listener into story mode. Applied to your own process, this insight becomes concrete: for example, your Minimum Complete Story (MCS) — the roughly ninety-second spoken version of your novel — should open the same way to put you and your audience into story mode, which leads to quicker and more thorough story development.

The better your story fits the reader's mental schema, the more likely it is to lodge in memory — and the happier the reader is for having read it.

This post offers a bit of fun as we're talking about fairy tale cues. Naturally, this topic sounds suited for children, but it holds an important lesson for novelists, one you can apply directly to your own work.

There are two main points. First, these cues further our understanding of how readers actually read, especially how a story finds its way into memory and stays there. The operative idea is that human minds have a story "schema" — a mental model shaped to hold stories, which lets us comprehend and retain what we hear and read. Second, we apply that insight to your writing process, specifically your Minimum Complete Story (MCS) — the roughly ninety-second spoken version of your novel. In brief, hearing the magic words "once upon a time" shifts our brains into story mode with all the benefits that process entails.

Define Fairy Tale

So what, exactly, is a fairy tale? At its core, it's a story, reduced to its essence: the five stock elements of character, world, conflict, theme, and plot, arranged simply. This reduction is precisely why fairy tales appeal to children — they're built to effectively teach growing minds the lessons tellers want to convey. This same reduction also allows fairy tales to reveal something essential about stories more generally.

Fairy tales' remarkable durability reinforces this insight. There's a stable inventory of them: roughly 2,500 by one count, once every plot variation is tallied. More notably, the same stories resurface across cultures independently. The written version of Cinderella, for example, appeared in China around 860 AD, under the name Ye Xian. The same story surfaced again in France in the 1600s and, more recently, became a Disney film. We all know it: abandoned girl, evil stepmother, magic carriage, prince, search, slipper, and happy ending.

It's unlikely that France copied China. Rather, these basic stories seem to emerge from human experience. More importantly, fairy tales take this shape because every element is necessary for a story to function.

Sources

Two separate bodies of research inform this argument. One is what we can call anthropological. Here, Vladimir Propp first cataloged fairy tale structure in Morphology of the Folktale (1928), later extended by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson's The Types of the Folktale. Essayist Anthony Madrid's observation, discussed shortly, on the ubiquity of "once upon a time" belongs here too. The other body of research is more cognitive. In this line, Brian Boyd's On the Origin of Stories remains one of the only sustained examinations of memory and stories.

What follows, however, is also conjectural, for good reason. Studying stories scientifically is notoriously difficult. Novels rank among the most complex messages humans produce, and unlike votes or other behaviors we can observe by the thousands, no two novels resemble each other closely enough to compare at scale. Add memory to the equation and the problem compounds. The most advanced tool, functional MRI, is typically limited to a single sentence and a handful of subjects — hardly enough to shed light on novels. So what follows adds what we know about memory to what we know about stories, combining them to provide useful insights for authors.

Fairy Tale Cues

Cues identify and segment content; here they map ideas onto a story's elements. Storytellers insert them at key points to help audiences understand and follow along. These are the more obvious Fairy Tale Cues (FTCs) and their relationship to plot:

Setup — "Once upon a time…"
Inciting Incident — "Then one day…"
Rising Action — "First… second… third…"
Climax — "Until finally…"
Resolution — "...happily ever after."

Crucially, these aren't mere decorative flourishes. They offer younger audiences real help. For our purposes, the main point is that they are universal. Every culture on earth tells stories, and every culture on earth embeds cues like these inside them. That pattern has probably persisted for thousands of years, surviving the arrival of both print and digital media — and that kind of universality teaches us something about how the human brain is wired for storytelling.

3. Observations

More precisely, this pattern leads to three observations:

Universal cues — these cues are universal, which says something significant about how the human brain and memory work.
"Once upon a time" — the single most important and universal cue, which merits its own examination.
Application — all of this should inform how you approach your own writing process.

1. Universal Story

These cues imply something authors should fix in their minds; specifically that there is a universal story structure, some template every story shares. The most immediate association is Freytag's Pyramid; remember his five well-known elements: inciting incident, rising action, peak, falling action, resolution. Every story operates this way, and the cues themselves only function because they depend on the deep structure embedded in our brains that we use for stories.

The technical term for this structure is a schema — a memory "model" that holds concepts stored for future use. Schemas stem from patterns, in this case regularities that appear in stories. The story schema takes its shape from what every well-formed story contains and how these elements fit together. It's important to know this term because a schema lets us describe exactly what a story needs to do to lodge in memory: fit the schema.

Think of these schemas as story-shaped boxes. Our brains obviously don't have literal boxes; that's a metaphor. Respecting the aforementioned caveats, our observation suggests that people possess a memory model devoted specifically to storing stories, shaped to fit what we might call the "ideal" story. This leads to today's main point: the better your story fits that "ideal," the easier it is to comprehend, the more likely it is to lodge in memory, and the happier its reader will be.

(Great) Stories > Memory

Why does fitting the template matter so much? Imagine that each schema has a set of slots, and each slot holds a particular element, like character. In addition, the slots have to fit together like puzzle pieces. Great stories properly fill the slots and are easier to follow and remember. The following thoughts about the potential relationship between great storytelling and memory summarizes a great deal of scientific research:

Templates support comprehension. A main character is required, for instance; a story without one leaves readers searching for whoever should fill that slot, instead of following the story.
Organization supports coherence. Readers understand well-organized stories more easily because these stories fit the schema.
Emotions attach importance. Our feelings function as an attention-allocation mechanism; provoking strong emotional reactions increases the odds that a story will be lodged in memory.
Schematization facilitates retrieval. A story that fits the schema is easier to recall, both its major elements as well as specific details.
Schematization increases fidelity. When stories stick to the pattern, they prove easier to pass along — think of the telephone game, where a message drifts further from the original with every retelling; a story that clings to its pattern resists that drift.

More broadly, authors should realize that deviating from the ideal story pattern can be interesting up to a point, but every deviation adds cognitive load, which makes a satisfying reader experience less likely.

2. Once upon a time

This "once upon a time" phrase merits special attention, because it may be the most important cue. As Anthony Madrid puts it, some version of it appears in every folktale ever recorded, from China to Peru; he adds "as though some law of physics were involved." Notably, his allusion to physical law parallels our description of the story schema and its implications.

Why would a phrase achieve that remarkable ubiquity? A few reasons spring to mind. "Once upon a time," first, functions as a prime. Hearing those words automatically shifts a listener's brain into story mode. It does the same for the teller, who tends to adopt the cadences of good storytelling magically once the phrase is spoken. There's a second reason: it prompts the teller to encapsulate the setup, the most important part of any story. Remember, get your setup right, and you're well positioned. Get it wrong, and nothing that follows fully compensates.

3. Application

How can these observations help your writing process? The most direct application is your Minimum Complete Story, or MCS — the spoken, ninety-second version of your novel. Recall, your MCS and your novel are both stories, so both should fit the same story-shaped box; the only meaningful difference is format. One runs roughly a hundred thousand words on the page; the other is told aloud in about ninety seconds.

So, take advantage of this phrase's power by starting your MCS with "once upon a time," until the MCS skill becomes second nature. It performs the same function here as it does anywhere else: activating story mode, for you and for whoever is listening. Within your MCS, then, the primary task is to fill each slot — character, world, conflict, theme, plot — the way you'd stock the drawers of a chest.

From there, resist the temptation to memorize your MCS and recite it word for word. Instead, recall the elements from the schema and tell the story around them. With practice, you can do this automatically because you are in storytelling mode. Using this approach allows the story to "live" and develop. We don't expect your MCS to stabilize until you're well into the novel. The exploration leads to better work. For example, when inspiration — in the form of a great idea — inevitably strikes, don't discard what you have. Instead, aim to tell your living MCS in a way that integrates the inspiration with existing content. A better version of your story will rapidly emerge to serve as the basis for your efforts going forward.

Fit the schema, lead with your setup, and let coherence do the rest. Every fairy tale we've discussed here ends with some version of "happily ever after." Structure your story the same way, and there's a decent chance yours will too.

We look forward to your thoughts or questions at joinus@bardsy.com.

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