#Microblog Monday 519: Retelling Stories
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I read a fascinating piece on the power of retelling stories. Not your own story (though there is a different power in that), but taking Shakespeare or a Greek tragedy or a favourite fairy tale and giving it new life by playing with elements of the story.
There’s comfort in returning to worlds we already know the rules of and characters we already love and understand … writers are drawn to retellings because they’re often the stories they grew up with, or have heard again and again. These stories might have taught us what stories were.
More than the story itself, it is the choosing of the story. Why are we drawn to certain situations? Certain characters? Certain settings? How does changing one element of the original story change your entire understanding?
What story would you love to see retold? I’m drawn to a bunch of Hans Christian Andersen stories, including “The Nightingale,” which sounds so much cooler when you call it Nattergalen.
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1 comment
Yes! I love the re-telling of familiar stories. Especially if there is an element of subversion there… For me, it all started with Gianni Rodari’s retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood”, where a grandfather keeps making mistakes (as it turns out, on purpose!) with the story and is being corrected by the grandchild.
I like the idea of taking something familiar, something that you pretty much know by heart, and changing details – until the story turns into something else entirely!
I love re-tellings of folklore stories. I’ve been drawn to “Beauty and the Beast”- type stories. I love how a deeper understanding of a character changes the perception from “beast” to “sympathetic hero”. (unfortunately, there are a lot of cheesy and unsatisfying retellings of that one….)