How To Write Fairytale Retellings: digging deeper

   Time for the second part of the How To Write Fairytale Retellings series! Last week's was lots of fun (and you can check it out here if you missed it!), and I'm super excited to dig in deeper ;). Who's ready?

   Last week we messed around with creating what-if questions for rewriting fairytales, and this week I chose four of those questions (one from each category!) to expand upon. Let's take a look at how we can dig deeper into those what-if questions ...

The POV what if: what if Rumpelstiltskin was told from Rumpelstiltskin's point of view? 

   See, the POV ones get tricky, because you're basing the retelling off of someone else's point of view. But there still needs to be twists and a side to the story that we didn't know about. So how would you do that with Rumpelstiltskin?

   Well, first off, you could stick with him being the villain and have it be a story from the villain's point of view (these retellings are always cool, I like seeing the "why" behind the villain's actions), OR you can show that there was a different side to the story that we didn't know before.

   Maybe Rumpelstiltskin had forseen that the child he was trying to take would lead the kingdom into ruin, and he knew the only way to save it. Or maybe the child had been prophesied as the warrior that would save the fae folk, and he needed to bring it home. Or he knew the child was a changeling, not the Queen's real child at all - but he wasn't able to tell her. There's tons of things you could throw in to twist the entire story around with this one, it's just too much fun! xD

 The Twisty-Tale what if: what if Sleeping Beauty meant to prick herself? 

    Obviously, Sleeping Beauty (we'll call her Briar-Rose because I very much prefer it) would need a good reason to want to put herself to sleep for a hundred years. Why? What's her reasoning?

   Well, maybe she's using the hundred-year sleep as a way to escape from a disastrous marriage that would ruin her kingdom. Maybe the "sleep" isn't really sleeping at all, but a series of dream-trails that Brier-Rose knows she must pass before she can become Queen. Maybe the only way to protect her people is by sacrificing herself - whether that means that falling prey to the spindle's curse will save the people from an outside danger, or save them from herself (OH, THE PLOT BUNNIES). 

    This one is actually the what-if question from a novella that I wrote YEARS ago (and will never return to *shudders*) for the Rooglewood Sleeping Beauty writing contest, and I can attest that it is a very fun one to play with! <3 Except I'm never looking at 14-year-old-Savannah's version of it ever again. Nope. Not.

how I feel about that old novella xD

The backstory what-if: how did Peter Pan find Neverland and the Lost Boys?  

   I'm not a wizard when it comes to backstory retellings, but this is one that's always had me curious! How did Peter Pan find his Neverland? What was his childhood - his before-permanent-childhood childhood - really like? What made him not want to grow up?

   Maybe he watched his older sister - who used to play with him and make up the most wonderful stories - start getting older and lose her interest in adventures. Maybe he saw the careworn lines in the face of his father,  or the way that none of the grown-ups could find any fun the way that he could. And so he decides to leave, and ends up running into Tinkerbell, who takes him to Neverland. Or maybe he finds Neverland all on his own? Maybe he discovers pixie dust and sails off all on his own after the second star.

   ... wow, plot bunnies are doing ALL the attacking right now, you guys xD. I think this would be a really cool idea to mess around with! Who knows what incredible stories y'all could come up with about Peter Pan before he become the eternity child? (just be warned that whoever takes on this tale...will have to deal with very angry fangirls if they get the story wrong. Just saying' *shrugs*)

The Continuation what if: what if Snow White finds another magic mirror - and realizes that the Mirrors are actually trapped people?

   The continuation what if is probably the most open-ended retelling that you can do, and rests just on the edge of being its own story and not a retelling at all. So the hardest part of writing a continuation is, in my opinion, still having it stay true to the original story. And how can you do that with a continuation of Snow White's story?

   Well, maybe there can be a thing about poisoned apples. They can be a contraband item in the kingdom (but people still smuggle them ... shh!), and tie into the continued plot really well. And another big part of the Snow White story is the seven dwarfs - so it would be really fun, in a continued story, to show us what the dwarfs (if they're dwarfs at all in your retelling - after all, its your story!) went on to do AFTER the Snow White story. And of course, there's the Mirror - which is where the trapped people element comes in. Maybe after the Evil Queen died, the Mirror broke free of some oath of silence and can finally tell people what really happened.

   But, since this is a continuation story, try to drop lots of little hints and tie-ins to the original stories. Its always fun for us readers to go "aha!" and get madly excited as we point at all the little hints we were able to catch as we watch the pieces fall together.

   And that about finishes up the second part of this part of the series! I hope it was fun for y'all to get a deeper look at what these stories could possibly be. The next post in this series will be up in about a week, and we'll be figuring out how to tie everything together to make your story a real retelling. So much sure to follow along! You aren't gonna want to miss it ;).

~ Savannah Grace 

which one of this ideas would you most like to write?

can you think of any more ways to dig deeper with these four ideas?