Since I was a girl, wherein I was adorable, I have LOVED fairy tale rewrites!
I’m Red Riding Hood! Aren’t I adorbs? Yes. Though too much bangs, Mumma! Those took forever to grow out. Sigh. Sign and alas.
My love of rewrites started with Beauty, A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast by Robin McKinley.
I freaking love this book to this day. This was my first favorite and I read it time and again. But I think this is my current favorite:
This book is the kind of masterful story telling that energizes me while also making me jealous! So dang jealous! Even still I can not WAIT to read it to my little girls. Honestly, there are so many wonderful fairy tale rewrites. I could list them and list more. Gail Carson Levine has a career of rewriting them, and all of her rewrites are amazing. And Robin McKinely wrote TWO Beauty and the Beasts. (For that matter, Gail Carson Levine wrote two versions of Cinderella.) I love them both.
I will do the same someday. Maybe I’ll write three just to have written three. I mean Beauty and the Beast, though I do have a plotted version of Cinderella. The stories in fairy tales are so archetypal you can do it again and again–as evidenced by the literally hundreds of people who have played with the classic stories and come up with entirely different stories.
I have plotted out a whole series of fairy tales with Rose Red and Red Riding Hood and the Snow Queen and…
Though, to be perfectly honest, I’ve plotted two series and a stand alone Beauty and the Beast. Fairy tales were the first stories I wanted to write. Or rewrite. In fact, I intended to start writing (when I finally got brave enough to try writing the stories I’d been dreaming of), with the one about the girl whose brothers were turned into birds. That story was so precious to me, I didn’t start there. I was afraid to, so I started with something I intended to be a light funny story. I ended up with These Lying Eyes.
But, *my* rewrite of Snow White–my favorite fairy tale–is being published this month. I’ve told the story before that I started with a new doucment and the words Snow White. My goal, at the time, was simply looking to up my word count for Nano. The world grew from there and went to incorporate plot lines I’ve been playing with for years.
Once, I dreamed I was queen of a magic land and another time when I dreamed I was the abandoned child who had been adopted by giants. In this case, giants who were simply larger than normal people not Jack and the Beanstalk giants. I have the most lovely dreams. These stories will like make their way to the same world that is home to my Snow White.
My stand alone Beauty and the Beast plot line came just a week or two ago and was so much a novelized story that, while dreaming, I thought, “Oh there’s part one of the story.” I guess I know I’m a real writer now when I break my dreams down into a story arc while still having them.
Or, perhaps, I’m just a freak.
~Amanda
Amanda A. Allen 