The First Fan Voice: What One Reader Said About Snow White That Stopped Me Cold
This post is built around your first real Fan Voices submission, which hasn’t come in yet. I’ve written the full frame below — swap the placeholder box for the actual quote once you receive it, and adjust the closing paragraphs to match what it says. Everything else is ready to publish as-is.
I built the Fan Voices project expecting it to be a nice bonus feature. I didn’t expect the first submission to change how I thought about the whole book.
Why I Built This In
From the start, Once Upon a Source was never meant to be just my take on these stories. I wanted room for readers, fans, teachers, and lifelong Disney people to say what these films — and the stories underneath them — actually meant to them. So I built Fan Voices: a simple way to submit a quote, with the best ones getting printed in the book itself, right alongside the chapter they connect to.
I knew I’d get some sweet answers. I knew I’d get some funny ones. What I didn’t expect was for the very first submission to land the way it did.
The Submission
Replace this box with the actual first Fan Voices quote
“[Insert the real quote here, along with the contributor’s name and a line or two about who they are.]”
[Once you have the real submission, write 2-3 paragraphs here about what stood out about it, why it “stopped you cold,” and what it revealed about the project. Talk about the contributor a little — who they are, what film they wrote about, and why their specific words mattered. This is the emotional core of the post, so let it breathe.]
Why This Kind of Story Matters
Every chapter of Once Upon a Source pairs a Disney film with the older story that inspired it. But a book is a one-way conversation. Fan Voices is the part where the conversation goes both ways — where the project stops being just mine and starts belonging, a little, to everyone who’s ever loved one of these films enough to have a story about it.
This won’t be the last spotlight. If your story ends up here next, you’ll know exactly what that means.
Share Your Story
Tell us what one of these films — or the story behind it — has meant to you. It might end up in the book.