Retold Stories: Worth the Hype, or Totally Lame?

Retold Stories are a genre of writing in which the author takes a popular, well-known story and twists them, narrates them from another person's point of view, or rewrites the ending. Now, if you are thinking, "I've never read one of those," you are probably wrong. It can be said that nearly all of the Disney princess movies are retold stories. These fairy tales, documented (but certainly not written) by brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, were originally dark and gruesome. (Now whether or not these stories were always dark or just simply altered by the Grimm brothers into more dark and misogynistic tales is another story.) But of course, Disney couldn't market stories involving sex and blood and death to children, so they altered the endings, giving us the family-friendly fairy tales we have come to know and love.

Retold Story Alert! Our girl Pocahontas was actually 11 when she met Smithy boy. Awkward...

So, what's with all the Hype?

So what makes retold stories an interesting genre and not just a rip-off of popular stories that other people put hard work into making? Well, there are a number of pros.

1. I'm sure we all have read certain stories and wanted a different ending. Or maybe we wanted to understand a story from another character's perspective. Retold stories are a way to get these alternate endings and perspectives. Often we can get a whole new understanding of the piece if it is written by an outsider (that is, not the original author) because we get a fresh perspective.

2. No story is ever really original. Even if an author is not doing a direct retelling of a specific story, they are always drawing ideas and inspiration from other stories, music, art, daily experiences and so on. I am personally of the opinion that this isn't stealing, its improving. As long as you aren't copying word for word, idea for idea of course.

3. Because we are usually familiar with the original content of a retold story, the retold story itself offers us a lot more in a shorter amount of time because we don't need a whole lot of exposition and history to explain what is going on.

4. They are usually really cool!

So, it is pretty obvious that retold stories cannot exist without original stories. But they are still interesting reads, and can even give us insight on how to create different perspectives within our own original stories that we may be writing.

But Are They Really That Great?

But what are the cons? Are there any?

1. Retold stories can be a challenge to write just because you are competing with lots of other authors writing retold stories about the same subject. As more people write retold stories on the same original piece of work, it becomes harder to create a story with a unique perspective.

2. You don't want to accidentally write a retold story that contains the same ideas as another retold story and be accused of plagiarism.

3. It might be difficult to sustain a writing career simply off of retold stories. You are eventually going to have to write your own original stuff.

There aren't too many cons to writing/reading a retold story that I can think of. They are very interesting reads for casual readers and authors who wish to gain insight into writing different perspectives.

Personal Experience

Now I will talk about my own experience writing a retold story based on Frankenstein. I had a pretty hard time at first. I'm the kind of person who needs a flash of inspiration in order to start writing a new story, and if I don't connect with anything in a story it can be hard to think of something.

I started off writing a story about a young french girl named Marie who's father detests her for killing her mother in childbirth. Marie has many imaginary friends. One day, one of these imaginary friends comes to life and kills Marie's cat and father. Marie is blamed for the deaths and thrown in jail. This story is very loosely based on Frankenstein, as you can see. For one, it was mostly inspired by Mary Shelley's life, who spent a lot of her childhood daydreaming, and wrote Frankenstein as a ghost story. The part about the little french girl getting wrongfully accused of murder was based off of Justine's wrongful condemnation in Frankenstein. The creation of Marie's imaginary friend was loosely based off of Victor creating his monster.

After I wrote this story, which I really enjoyed by the way, I realized that it wasn't strong enough to be submitted as a retold story. It seemed like a stretch to connect all these separate elements together. So instead I wrote a new story where Elizabeth kills Frankenstein's monster on her wedding night, instead of the monster killing her. I liked this story a lot better.

So, as you an see, it can be quite hard to think of ideas for a retold story that is both unique and draws readers in without confusing or boring them to death. But, if the story is executed properly, it can be really engaging and make an excellent story.