Thursday 16 February 2012

Reworking Fairy Tales

The park and ride bus into Cambridge yesterday made me think about that old writing prompt, the reworking of a fairy tale. The teenager next to me was reading a book where the heroine was called Ash and had a stepmother. Sounds familiar? I’m not sure if it was the book ‘Ash’ by Malinda Lo. If it was, the twist in the reworking has Ash ending up in a lesbian relationship, just one of endless takes made on this particular fairy tale over the centuries. With the current young adult interest in the supernatural, reworking of fairy tales is selling books, films and TV. A recent addition, proving to be very popular, is the American fantasy-drama, Grimm. I have not caught the series yet, but I like the premise of detectives investigating crimes based on fairy tales.

Reworking fairy tales is an idea I’ve always enjoyed, but then I have always loved the original fairy tales. One of the books I liked to read to classes of junior children was Kaye Umansky’s ‘The Fwog Pwince - the Twuth’, and I have used the reworking writing prompt in various guises with children and adults. The year 4 team I worked with in Leicestershire had great fun producing newspaper reports based on the events in nursery rhymes along the lines of ‘Fairytale News’ by Colin Hawkins, which has a mini-newspaper insert full of reports based on fairy tales.
 
Familiarity with the story is what makes this a good writing prompt and I have used it for a quick write, and for longer (homework) sessions with writing groups. What you are asking writers to work on is developing their
version of a famous story, short or long, but with the aim of making it different and there are many ways you might do this. If you fancy having a go, think about one of the variations below:

  1. Inject some local knowledge. Rework the fairy tale by setting it in a place you know well.
  2. Bring the story up-to-date. How will you have to change the plot to make it fit in a modern setting? I think ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ would make a great basis for something set in the current political climate. Of course, reworking does not have to just be about fairy tales. ‘Gods Behaving Badly’ by Marie Phillips is about the twelve gods of Olympus, who are alive and well in the twenty-first century, unhappily crammed together in a London townhouse and holding down jobs.
  3. Choosing to set the story in an easily recognisable time period also works well with reworking fairy tales. Victorian or Elzabethan London might make a good place for Cinderella to live, but then so would the Wild West. I’ve always wondered why the world around Sleeping Beauty never seemed to change much in the story. What would happen if she woke to the world of the 1920s, with flapper costumes and looser morals all around her?
  4. Rewriting the fairy tale in a particular genre could bring interesting results. Ali Baba and the Forty Theives as sci-fi - or has that been done in the film ‘The Time Bandits’? What about Goldilocks and Snow White teamed-up as Philip Marlowe style detectives? Am I getting carried away here? Maybe I should stop watching all the Shrek films!
  5. Rewriting a fairy tale as a poem can be fruitful. I stumbled across a website where the author has done just this (RewritingFairy-tales)  It’s certainly something which worked for Roald Dahl in ‘Revolting Rhymes’. If you haven’t read that, get down to your library straight away! 
  6. You could try to write the story from a different point of view – first person is currently very fashionable, or do what Kaye Umansky does in her poem ‘I’m sick of that Hansel and Gretal’ (‘Witches in Stitches) and write from the antagonist’s point of view.

There are endless variations on the theme of reworking an old tale and many bestsellers have been produced along these lines. A quick search will bring you up lots of original stories, but if your memory fails you and you can’t think of any off the top of your head, try some of the ones below. Above all, have fun. Right at the bottom of this post is a very short story I wrote after setting this writing prompt for a group.
Aesop's Fables
The Ass in the Lion's Skin
The North Wind and the Sun
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
The Sick Lion
The Tortoise and the Hare
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
Hans Christian Andersen
The Emperor's New Clothes
The Little Mermaid
The Princess and the Pea
The Snow Queen
Thumbelina
The Ugly Duckling
Grimms Fairy Tales
Beauty and the Beast
Cinderella
Goldilocks And The Three Bears
Hansel and Gretel
Little Red Riding Hood
Sleeping Beauty
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
The Three Little Pigs
Nursery Rhymes
Baa Baa Black Sheep
Little Boy Blue
Little Miss Muffet
Mary Had A Little Lamb
There Was An Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe


 Trials of the Job

“Mirror, mirror, on the …”
“Get lost!”
          The mirror was entirely black. It wouldn’t even show Esmeralda her own reflection, let alone any magical revelations. Stamping her foot did nothing to galvanise the mirror either, though her broom began sweeping the kitchen floor, which was a small bonus.
                       
“I need to see what she’s doing.” Esmeralda did not usually resort to begging.
          “Phone her.” The mirror replied in a flat, arms folded across the chest kind of voice.
          “Why are you being so awkward?” Strangely, Esmeralda felt tears pricking at her eyes and turned away from the mirror before it saw her weakness.
          “I don’t like being used.”
          “You’re a mirror for God’s sake. What are you for if not for using?”

          Esmeralda was feeling cross now and yet she knew that it was no use arguing. She just didn’t have any threats to hold over the mirror short of smashing it and that was the one thing she could never do.
          “She’s never been in this situation before.” Esmeralda tried appealing to the mirror’s better nature. “It’s not really sneaking. It’s just showing we care.”
          A small glimmer of light began to flicker in the furthest depths of the glass. That had sparked its conscience and Esmeralda quickly moved to press her point home.
          “What if she’s in danger? She could be lying in an alley, her life blood slowly seeping into the litter strewn gravel.”
          Suddenly the mirror flared into life, becoming a multifaceted diamond scattering beams of light in every direction, before settling down to a street scene where a small red devil was dragging a mini-witch by the hand towards a house. The windows were festooned with cobwebs and on the front step a particularly evil looking pumpkin sat grimacing at passers-by. Knocking on the door, the two cried in unison,
          “Trick or treat!”
          Sighing, Esmeralda returned to her cauldron. She allowed herself the smallest of smiles now that she knew her daughter’s first date was running smoothly.
In the background the mirror chuckled gently as it whispered,
          “Ah, the trials of motherhood!”





Friday 10 February 2012

Arvon Inspires

Today I am celebrating being half way through the final edit of my novel and well on the way to sending it out to agents in March. That’s the deadline I’ve set myself before I have to give up the luxury of being a full-time writer and go out and earn some money.

The celebration didn't involve much - just a cup of coffee and a break from editing to browse through the little Arvon Foundation Creative Writing Courses 2012 book which landed on my doormat sometime around Christmas. There are several courses I’d love to go on, but as I am currently unwaged I feel guilty spending such a lot of money.

If you haven’t come across the Arvon Foundation writing courses, you should check them out. They are expensive, so you need to be pretty serious about your writing, or immensely rich, but they are also of the highest quality and I can’t recommend them enough.  

Spending a wonderfully intense week completely immersed in the Arvon experience of ‘living as a writer’, where you are virtually cut off from the outside world, but in the company of like minded souls, was one of the best experiences of my life.  I can’t believe it’s nearly three years since I attended the fiction writing course at The Hurst, in the depths of Shropshire’s ‘blue remembered hills’, which was led by the authors Jill Dawson and Kathryn Heyman.


The Hurst
I was incredibly nervous before arriving on the course, especially since a friend’s husband had been on one and said there was one attendee who would only read out her work from behind a cupboard door. I’d watched Big Brother and the thought of being shut away with a load of weirdos was not what I was paying so much money for. I needn’t have worried. The folks on my course were fantastic and I’ve kept in contact with several of them. I can still remember the incredible buzz the course left me with, and how it was partly responsible for some life changing decisions (see 'About Lesley' for more on those).


Ah well, back to the editing. I'm coming up to a couple of tricky sections and need to decide whether to drastically cut a couple of chapters or to rewrite them into several shorter chapters. Either way needs careful thought if I am going to maintain the pace and keep the sense of the sections. The trouble with this editing lark is that I am at heart a procrastinator hidden behind a veneer of wicked organisation. I have always known I work better to a deadline, so setting my own deadlines is not a good thing. Before Christmas I was allowing myself to be seriously sidelined by new house and new dog stuff, but I am determined to keep on track now, apart from the obvious distraction of writing for this blog!


Wednesday 8 February 2012

Picture This 3

I love this chap's face all squashed up against the glass, but just who is he and what's he doing?


Ten Minutes to Spare?

I love taking part in what I call 'quick writes' - taking a writing prompt and running with it for a set time. I use this with groups of adults and children alike. It's quite something to see everyone with their heads down and scribbling away. Somehow the pressure of working like this lights that creative spark for me, though I understand some people find the pressure a bit of a strain. The same activity would also good for a writing warm-up to be undertaken in the solitary confinement of your own writing space. 


For this activity you choose a storyline from one set of boxes and a genre from the other, then write for ten minutes without stopping. 



A woman/man walks into a room and finds a character of the opposite sex they weren’t expecting.
Two people meet on a bridge and one hands over a package.

A person climbs a cliff and someone is waiting for them at the top.

Something to do with the weather results in school girl being discovered as a blackmailer.
A group from a village Women's Institute win a competition to go on safari together.
While snooping around her employer's house a babysitter is and finds something disturbing.
A character hopes for a fresh start at their new school, but arriving on their first day they encounter someone they have met before.
Your character suspects their partner is having an affair and decides to spy on them. What they discover is unexpected.
A character buys an antique urn for their home, but when they get it home, they find there are ashes in it.



horror
historical
romantic
chick lit
sci-fi
fantasy
crime
rags to riches
war