My Musings on the Tales Retold Challenge

This is possibly my favourite kind of story - a well known fairytale, not just retold, but twisted. Turned upside down and inside out. Modernised. Flipped on its head. Made into a parody of itself. Reimagined from another perspective. Let's make the hero the villain. Let's make the villain a sympathetic character.

This kind of prompt oils the creative wheels - it's like fanfiction, but of the best sort. It's perfect if you are suffering a bout of writer's block. You don't need to wrestle with an empty page, or a lack of inspiration. There is a ready-made range of ideas to choose from. Pick one that sings, and away you go.

Many of these stories are hundreds of years old. Many centuries - and that is only since they were preserved like pressed butterflies between pages. They go back further even than that. They are in the very bones of us, and this fact can be both humbling and exciting.

I sometimes wonder how much they evolved before they were captured and pinned down, and how that capturing likely stopped - or at least, stunted and altered - their evolution. Until another writer comes along and breathes new life into the dusty old tale.

Re-writing them makes us stop and look at the world and all the things we thought we knew in a new light, from a new angle. The mould we thought long since set solid cracks completely apart. Light gets in. Growth happens. Stories are a kind of magic. They have the power to re-shape, not just the way we experience the world, but the world itself.

My re-imagined fairy tales are often pretty dark. I like to think that's because fairy tales are pretty dark, at their roots. Maybe it's me, though. Maybe I'm not as cheery as I think I am. Or maybe I am, but only because I draw out the dark sticky stuff and write with it. Isn't that funny - the "me" you "know" through the pages is an extremely authentic version of me, but also nothing like the "me" that anyone else knows.

Given how much I love this style of writing, I surprised myself by only making four entries to this challenge - and only one of them was new. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe because I came to the challenge a little late. Maybe I gave myself I bit of performance anxiety. I know that I will keep rewriting fairy tales long after the closing date.

I do hope Vocal do another challenge like this one in future. Possibly a microfiction challenge - that is something I haven't tried yet, and it would really push me! I'd love to see a future challenge be a little narrower than this one - a specific story, or a short list of stories to choose from would be good. Or give us free rein with the source material, and tell us the twist to put on it. Make the villain the hero? Bring the story into the modern world? Tell it as a series of letters, like Bram Stoker's Dracula?

In the meantime, there are plenty of other challenges to get my teeth into 😁

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My pieces, the pieces of me

Newest to oldest - here we go!

East of the Sun and Text of the Moon

I squeaked this one into the contest with something like an hour to spare! It's probably the weirdest thing I've written on here. I've not used this format before and I'm honestly not sure how well it worked. (Your feedback is welcome by the way.)

It's based on an old fairy tale called East of the Sun and West of the Moon, which I believe is a forerunner to later tales like Beauty and the Beast. I like that this is one of the lesser known stories, probably because Disney haven't got their claws into it. I also like that the heroin rescues the prince (probably because Disney haven't got their claws into it). I love the underlying moral message of delayed gratification as well. (I never take it on board, but that doesn't mean I can't admire it as a concept.)

Run, Run As Fast As You Can

This is my take on the Gingerbread Man. I was going for a horror, or a comedy horror, but the end result was much sadder than I ever anticipated. There is some real life experience in here (not my own, but things I've seen others go through.) I took a bit of inspiration from Pet Semetary for this one.

The Sugar Shack

A re-telling of Hansel and Gretel. I always say I don't "do" horror. I don't consume a lot of it, since it usually bores me... That leaves me thinking I think I am poorly equipped to do it well. I don't know where these monsters came from, but they were very vivid in my own mind, and they wouldn't leave me alone. They wanted to be in a story.

The REAL Story of the Three Little Pigs

This is a re-write of a homework assignment from when I was about 13. My thanks to Mr Rathbone, the English teacher, for setting it, and to my classmate Jemma for her contribution. This one is much more silly and lighthearted than my usual attempts. I like it, though. It's a breath of fresh air to me. I do have a sense of humour (buried in here somewhere) and it's nice to let it out once in a while.

The Scientist's Daughter

This one is my second favourite out of all my submissions to Vocal. It's my own re-imagining of The Little Mermaid. It's very special to me. It was one of those stories that itch and nag at you until you relent and poultice them out.

It's told from the perspective of characters who were never in the original at all.

I wondered: what if everyone in the story is the opposite of what you think they are? What if she didn't come to live on land because she loved him? What if she hated and feared him, but she went looking for him because she thought he was the only one who could help her? What if he wasn't gentle and charming - what if he was cruel and corrupt and misogynistic? What if the "Sea Witch" was, first and foremost, like so many of the "witches" on land - a wise woman, a healer?

I had so much fun with this concept. I wrote a longer, serialised version of it here. I had Snow, Apples, Glass in mind when I wrote this (you can probably tell; the title is a nod to it). Gaiman is a master at this kind of retelling, and Snow Apples Glass is my favourite version of Snow White (next to Rammstein's offering, obviously).

Your pieces

Here are a few entries from other writers that I enjoyed. It's not exhaustive by a long mile.

A Forest of Thorns by Alexander McEvoy

The Emperor's New Clothes by Ralph Emerson

Cinderella is the Evil Stepsister by Katie Dee

No More Neverland by JP Harris

Scales and Pearls by Lauren Everdell

The Troll and Her Prince by Ian Read

The Last Dream of Aurora by LC Minniti

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Thank you for reading!

Thank you to Vocal for taking the suggestion on board and creating the Tales Retold challenge. (I'm also very grateful for the $25 bonus, by the way.)

Please do leave me a thoughtful comment so I can reciprocate the read!

If you have entered this challenge, please leave me a link to your submission in the comments - I am sure there are MANY I haven't read yet! If you've got more than one, give me your best effort.

I respectfully ask please don't leave links unless it's to your own submission for the Tales Retold challenge. It's a pet peeve of mine.

Fun fact - the image is of Eltz Castle in Germany. I picked it because it does look like a real life fairytale castle.