Retelling Fairy Tales

Fairy tale retellings are a perennially popular both among readers and among writers. Since I’ve written a couple, I occasionally get questions or comments about writing them. The most common one comes from people who ask “How do you do that?” in a rather awestruck tone. I used to put these folks in the same mental category as people who ask “But where do you get your ideas?” Then I realized that some of them are the sort of reader/writer for whom, once they read something, that is really, truly what happened, and they can’t figure out how to re-imagine the story.

Folk and fairy tales originate from oral storytelling traditions. Most people are aware of this, but they don’t think about what it means for the story. If you talk to a modern professional storyteller, they will tell you that the stories they tell change a little every time they tell them, depending on things like who is in the audience, where the storyteller is performing, how the audience reacts, and a bunch of other factors. A change that seems popular gets repeated; if it gets the same reaction from multiple audiences, it becomes part of the story. Elements get added based on current events, and subtracted later if they don’t hold up over time.

Most folk and fairy tales are short; many of them (even the literary ones that have a known author) have only a few lines of dialog and only one or two named characters. They’re long on plot and action, but seldom have specific description (“the handsome prince” and “the glittering ballroom” are not specific or detailed, by modern standards) or the sort of “show, don’t tell” characterization beloved of writing classes. They’re templates or story summaries.

(Note that I didn’t say “plot summaries.” A surprising number of fairy tales are episodic and disconnected; part of retelling them is making the given events into a sensible plot.)

All this means that retelling, revising, and recombining fairy tales is part of what fairy tales are, and how they work over time. The Aarne-Thompson-Uther tale-type index has 2,399 entries, and that doesn’t count different possible combinations. This leaves the author with a couple of possible ways to develop a fairy tale retelling. The first step, of course, is picking a fairy tale to work with. The fairy tale that speaks to the writer, that has haunted their imagination since childhood, is often the best place to start. (Not always; sometimes, that story feels too sacred to mess with. That’s OK; there are plenty of others.) And there is no need to worry that everyone else has done/will do that same tale. Back when editor Terri Windling asked eight of us to submit to her proposed Fairy Tale novel line, we worried about that, but when she asked us each which one we wanted to write, there was zero overlap. And even if you want to retell something like “Cinderella,” your version won’t be quite like anyone else’s.

Sometimes, it’s not that the tale haunts you, it’s that some element of the story fits perfectly into some other time or place or theme you want to explore. Sometimes, it’s a dissatisfaction with the behavior of one of the characters or the eventual outcome that you want to “fix” to make it more to your taste. Sometimes, it’s a “what if…” that twists the events of the story slightly (“What if Sleeping Beauty’s prince arrived a day early and died in the thorns because the 100 year spell wasn’t over yet?”) Sometimes, it’s just putting in all the dialog and description and characterization that isn’t there in the original short version. Or looking at the story through the eyes of a minor character, the villain, or a complete outsider whose life is affected by events.

In other words, retelling fairy tales is a lot like writing fanfiction, with the added bonus that you can argue quite convincingly that retelling fairy tales is part of what you’re supposed to do with them. People have been doing it for thousands of years, from Homer’s work to the Indian Ramayana to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Retellings of folk or fairy tales fall into a couple of different categories. There are straightforward retellings (which include some expansions), those that alter one or two elements of the story (e.g. characters, setting, viewpoint, etc.), combining two or more fairy tales, and using the story elements more symbolically.

Straightforward retellings are usually the familiar tale in the familiar setting, but expanded with missing scenes, logical reasons for events that are random in the short original, more detailed description and characterization, fully developed scenes, and so on. Quite often, the novelist has to add some original characters to fill in some of the scenes, or develop the “kind shopkeeper” or “castle steward” who has no name and a short mention in the fairy tale.

Altering elements of the story covers a wide variety of possibilities, from incorporating actual historical characters and/or changing the historical setting (Elizabeth Marie Pope’s The Perilous Gard), to changing one or more of the characters from a friendly animal-helper or enchanted beast to a human being (Kara Dalkey’s The Nightingale), all the way to using a modern setting and changing the characters jobs, abilities, and problems to fit (Charles de Lint’s Jack the Giant Killer), or telling the story from the viewpoint of the villain or a minor character (David Henry Wilson’s The Coachman Rat).

Combining fairy tales is just what it sounds like—mixing elements (usually characters or plot points) from two or more different tales (Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad is practically a master class in mixing, matching, and how stories work).

And using fairy tale story elements symbolically shows up in loads of literary fiction, where sometimes the underlying fairy tale is almost invisible.