Graphic by Peg Ihinger
Folk tales and fairy stories have been around for as long as people have. Specific details don’t always stay the same—there are over 300 versions of the story we mostly know as “Cinderella.” Some use a ring as identification, rather than a shoe; in others she attends the prince’s ball three nights in a row instead of once, but the bones of the story remain recognizable. Writers can do a lot of different things with those sorts of story-bones, so it’s understandable that people still rewrite and update fairy tales. The movie “Pretty Woman” is a modern retelling that recasts the prince as a wealthy man and the Cinderella character as a prostitute/escort; Elle Enchanted retells the canonical fairy tale as a fairy’s thoughtless christening gift gone wrong; The Coachman Rat follows the viewpoint of the rat who accidentally retains human intelligence and speech after having been Cinderella’s coachman; Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister tells the story from the point of view of one of the stepsisters; Tanith Lee’s short story “When the Clock Strikes” turns the fairy tale into a horror story of revenge, and that barely scratches the surface.
But for every successful retelling, updating, revision, or reimagining, there’s another that misses the mark completely. Using a fairy tale as the basis for a novel is not a guarantee of success. It’s not even a guarantee that the novel will be as good as the fairy tale. Whether it works depends on what the writer does with it, and there are more pitfalls to navigate than one might think.
Probably the first one has to do with where the writer is starting. It makes a huge difference whether one begins with wanting to expand on a favorite fairytale, like the many straightforward novel-length retellings of Cinderella, or whether one begins intending to reimagine a fairy tale plotline in the modern world. In the first instance, the writer will probably keep most of the fairy tale recognizable, including characters, plot, and historical setting. The finished novel may expand on things like the characters’ motivations, or center an actual historical event such as one of the bride-shows at which Russian or Byzantine emperors chose their empress, or choose a different viewpoint, but the story will be fundamentally the same.
Reimagining the fairy tale, on the other hand, often focuses on the themes and archetypes of the original story, rather than the events. This might mean downplaying some elements of the tale to better fit it into a realistic modern setting—instead of a prince, Cinderella is paired with a man who is high-status because of his wealth or fame; instead of a fairy godmother and a magical transformation, Cinderella gets a six-week course at a finishing school; etc. The story is recognizably the same, but details have been updated. On the other hand, reimagining may mean ignoring plot as well as period. A modern story in which Cinderella is the youngest sister of a poor family, who transforms into a fiery revolutionary when her siblings are mistreated, and who ends up hunted by the FBI after blowing up a major gala is barely recognizable as the story that inspired it.
It’s easy to go too far when trying to update a fairy tale. A realistically in-period rewrite of Cinderella can get away with making her father an alcoholic instead of absent/dead, but having her invent AA meetings and talk therapy in order to have said alcoholic father recover in time for her wedding to the prince is such an obvious imposition of modern culture on both the medieval/Renaissance period and the fairy-tale milieu itself that it breaks the suspension of disbelief for a lot of readers (me included). A modern retelling of Snow White where she runs away from her wealthy upbringing to become a union organizer for the dwarves works fine; the same premise doesn’t work if she’s a princess in a time when unions didn’t exist, let alone organizers, and serfs were a thing. A realistic modern retelling, on the other hand, has to invent a small, wealthy, imaginary country ruled by a monarchy if it wants to get away with a literal prince or princess as a central figure in the story, instead of going with a celebrity or child of wealth.
A few books, such as Peg Kerr’s The Wild Swans, manage to have it both ways by using two story threads—one a historical retelling, one a modern-day (or nearly) one. Some modern retellings work by making the magical/monarchical elements part of a “hidden world” that operates either in secret alongside the real one, or on a completely different, magical-supernatural plane that’s only accessible under specific conditions.
Humor is another way of making incompatible elements work together—if you’re writing an obvious parody, you can get away with all sorts of improbabilities, as long as they’re funny. Parody, in fact, is often even funnier if the medieval king is sending Prince Charming off to handle negotiations with the newly unionized palace guard, or Cinderella wants to be part of the rock band that’s opening the ball (rather than dancing at it). If it’s funny enough, people may not even notice that the Federal Aviation Administration hasn’t started investigating either Jack’s enormously tall beanstalk or the giant floating castle interfering with airplane routes (though actually, I think it would be funnier to have an FAA inspector running around trying to put all these improbabilities into bureaucratic language that won’t get him/her thrown in the loony bin).
Telling “the other side of the story”—i.e. changing the focus from Cinderella to someone else (the godmother, stepmother, prince, even the coachman)—can let the writer put in all sorts of stuff that was “left out” of the “official” (original well-known) version, whether we’re talking modern-day or period setting. It still doesn’t justify having someone invent Alcoholics Anonymous in 1648, though (there are limits). You can even present “the real story” while keeping the canonical main character, if said main character is grumpy about how their story was romanticized or cleaned up in the official version.
Ultimately, the real test is whether the story the writer wants to tell works well with the bits the writer is pulling from the original fairy tale. The musical “Annie” can be looked at as a Cinderella rags-to-riches story without the romance, in which the child protagonist is adopted by the wealthy tycoon instead of marrying him. Lots of the plot beats fit—the stepmother/orphanage manager who tries to prevent the connection, the search for the missing protagonist, etc. What the author chooses to leave out—the romance—is as important as what they chose to keep.
Riffing on fairy tales and the like is one of my favorite writing activities. I’ve played with the Coyote creation mythos, kitsunes, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Three Little Pigs, and of course Little Red Riding Hood.
My most well received is likely “Hänsel and Grendel”, but my personal favorite is “Snow White and the Seven Tragic Poets of the Court of Ptolemy the Second”, which I’ve also poked at turning into a screenplay.
All have been tongue-in-cheek; I don’t think I’ve ever considered doing a serious take.
Rule 34 applies. There are porn, fetish, and fetish-porn versions of fairy tales out there, mostly in the “hives of scum and villainy” parts of the web.
There’s also using obscure fairy tales. I did that in Over The Sea, To Me. (Yes, it’s based on a ballad. The tale is a known fairy tale type.)
And then there’s the fairy-tale mashup.
The Enchanted Forest Chronicles did a lot of that. With humor.
I combined it with using only obscure tales in The Princess Seeks Her Fortune, mixing up several sleeping princess tales in The Enchanted Princess Wakes, changing the point of view character to Sleeping Beauty’s cousin in The Other Princess, and having the villains organize against the heroes in Even After.
Hmm. All of them use a number of obscure tales, too. I was trying to make Even After only the well-known tales, and I failed.
I’d be interested to get everyone’s take on the type of variation that “reverses the polarity” of the fairy-tale original, making the bad guy a sympathetic main character, as in “Wicked” or “Maleficent.” It seems to me this approach has a strong tendency, among other things, to remake the original heroines or heroes as evildoers, so as to justify the original villain’s supposedly bad actions. That may push the tale out into the range of major departures from the original storyline that Ms. Wrede describes in the OP.
YMMV, but I tend not to care for them. It often comes across as the author trying to show how superior they are, because they don’t sympathize with that obvious hero(ine) that the narrative is telling you to like….
Then again, I may just be jaded. I thought it was brilliant when Fred Saberhagen did it decades ago with The Dracula Tapes; the many modern reversals seem to have a whiff of bandwagon-jumping about them.
Those are hard to do right.
The closer they hew to the original story, in general, the better it works, but changing the lighting has to be done right. Especially it can’t rely on sympathy with the viewpoint character, the changing has to be convincing and really make the actions different.
Tanith Lee did it in “Red As Blood”, where the Snow White character is a witch. And Erma Bombeck did it with a Cinderella who is a lazy liar and the stepmother is the viewpoint character.
I liked _Dorothy Must Die_ in this genre. There’s a raw quality to the writing and characterizations that works for me with this theme, and the corruption of the putative heroine is both plausible and viscerally awful.
I’ve read a fair amount of Oz pastiche and this is the only one that worked for me.
The graphic novel _Hatter M_ has a role reversal, not hero/villain but joke/deadly serious character, that also works for me. (The Hatter is the Mad Hatter from _Alice in Wonderland_ reimagined as a Driven Martial Artist. Which is very odd, and maybe that’s why it works.)
I did a bit of this with The Other Princess but the fairies remain the same. It’s just that the cursed princess is spoiled
Fairy-tale retellings aren’t usually my cuppa, but one of the novels clamoring to be next in the queue has Cinderella as the backstory (though with less magical mice and more the medieval equivalent of clever thrift shopping). What happens when this jumped-up commoner is thrust into court society? Will the royal magic ever accept her? And then there’s a threat to the kingdom, and a bit of role-reversal Snow White (-ish), and a choice between True Love and responsibility…. yeah. Since I haven’t started it yet, it sounds like a lot more fun than the thing I’m currently trudging through the back half of. 😉
There are folk variants of Cinderella where there is no use of magic at all. You’re golden there.
I wrote a loose Cinderella retelling once that I’m rather fond of. The POV character is Jess, the son of a wealthy merchant, who’s been in a secret relationship with Alec, the son of the local duke, for some time, and is heartbroken when the duke announces that Alec has to find a bride and produce an heir instead. His best friend Ellie comes up with a plan to marry Alec herself, which serves the dual purpose of getting her out of being treated as a servant by her father and stepmother and providing cover for Jess and Alec to continue their relationship. Jess helps her sneak out and go to the duke’s ball, where Alec pretends to be smitten with the beautiful stranger. Ellie’s parents spot her just before midnight, causing her to flee the ball and leave one of her slippers behind.
Being a theme fiend, if I was going to tackle something like this, I’d have to decide what it is I wanted my story to say. The underlying message of Cinderella is that the downtrodden and the industrious are as deserving of fortune as anyone. That’s a theme that is always worth restatement, but I don’t know as it would be mine.
The closest I ever came to fairy tales was The Adventures of Princess Onesie and Fairy Friend, where underneath all the silliness and anachronism [“Why do you always wear one-piece pajamas indoors?” Miss Crumpet seemed genuinely curious.
“Branding,” the princess said defiantly] I had something to say about self-image contrasted with image projected to others.
That’s a topic that’s nearer to my heart than Cinderella’s. Which is to say, if you want to take on a fairy tale, there’s nothing wrong with writing your own, if it tackles a topic that’s important to you.