A Sense of Doubt blog post #1961 - Retelling Stories - good or bad idea?
First, a thing that happened... GRRRR ARG!
DAMN!! Somehow Blogger malfunctioned! I had finished and PUBLISHED this post, and the next day, it was NOT in my published queue, and when I found it still in my lists of drafts, it was missing a ton of content that I did and saved multiple times.
Blogger has been super wonky all month since Google announced a shift to the NEW blogger and its plan to retire the legacy version. But now, mysteriously, and without explanation, Google announced it will allow users to continue using the legacy edition as an option as I am sure there was plenty of blow back from people like me who noticed features from the "legacy" version missing in the new version and expressing extreme displeasure, as I did here:
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1928 - new BLOGGER interface - I don't like it.
I am POSITIVE that the note on our dashboards DID NOT indicate we would still be able to use the legacy version indefinitely. I am POSITIVE it claimed we would all have to switch by July, which is what made me so incensed as some of the missing functions (search by pages by blog numbers) I use all the time to find past content in what is fast becoming 2000 total posts!
After all, what kind of numbskull designer creates a new interface and does away with previous useful features? Improvement means RETAINING previous features and improving them not eliminating them. This concept is Design Science 101.
Anyway, what if Google is making legacy edition janky to force those of us still using it to switch to the new Blogger?
That would be really shitty.
Anyway, I may have to go to saving my blog posts in Word documents again as offline backups if all of a sudden, for the first time EVER, Google's reliable platform is going to show serious flaws like what happened initially with this post.
Shame on you, Google.
If this kind of thing that's going to keep happening, it may hasten me to migrate all this content to my own domain and use Word Press, as I probably should have done in the first place, but I LIKE the convenience of this access to my blog in Google universe, and I have always been rather fond of Google and Blogger, so, hey, don't ruin it now, people!
Okay, thanks for reading that rant.
Now on to why we're really here today...
Whether I am teaching creative writing or not next quarter has yet to be determined. I gained more students today, and I am very close to the magic number. I am hoping I made it or made it close enough to the magic number for the course to survive.
Even if I am not teaching creative writing this quarter at LCC (and by "this," I mean "summer"), I am a writer, and I hope, at times, a creative one. I am working on a novella and some short stories. There's novels, too, but those are back-burnered (as in "to put on the back burner) for now while I work on shorter stuff. I almost wrote "shorter pieces," but I have this aversion to calling any chunk of writing, "a piece." I don't dislike the term as much as "tweet" for "Twitter message," but almost as much.
So, regardless of what I am teaching, I will be doing, and to provide myself extra motivation, I applied for faculty development money and will be taking a workshop class with Brooklyn's Sackett Street Writers in masters fiction writing (the supposedly more advanced course).
And so, with that obligation with which I foolishly saddled myself, I need to actually do some writing.
But damn, I am rusty.
The novella came together from an idea I had been working on before the COVID-19 pandemic but which fully crystallized when the pandemic swept the world, and most impactfully for myself and my family, the United States.
So, yeah, I am writing a novella about a pandemic. Because I am sure no one has thought of doing that right now (sarcasm). But I have to write it. The story and the world around it (50 or so years in the future) fully laid out its span and scope when I realized in that lightning strike of inspiration that the missing piece to the idea I had been turning over and over in my head like a chicken breast that just won't cook through even in 500 degree heat in covered gas grill was a PANDEMIC, a virus, and the measure to safeguard the population from infection.
So, that's the main thing.
And yet, I have been reading LOCUS MAGAZINE, the magazine of science fiction and fantasy for the industry, and reveling in the stories of writers and how they come to conceive their stories and accomplish them, and I have some ideas and inspiration.
But, did I mention being rusty?
I have to kick off the rust. And so, I am going to try something that is akin to what I teach composition students. I am going to do some "mash ups."
I am borrowing "mash up" from the Internet (mostly music) intentionally. Here's what I am mean by it.
A "mash up" is an Internet phenomenon usually dealing with music. Artists mix together two or more songs or song elements and create a new thing, usually in the form of a video. Different than sampling, mashups use tons of editing to create an entirely new thing. Popular mash ups include pieced together sounds from TV shows or speeches, as I showed recently with a Trump version of "Once in a Lifetime" by Talking Heads or a Christmas song featuring the cast of Star Trek the Next Generation or The movie versions of the Avengers from Marvel Comics. Good luck finding these on my blog, though. You would find them faster in a Google search.
Reading about mashups, I came across this cool nugget in the Wikipedia article:
The name Pop Will Eat Itself was taken from an NME feature on the band Jamie Wednesday, written by David Quantick, which proposed the theory that because popular music simply recycles good ideas continuously, the perfect pop song could be written by combining the best of those ideas into one track. Hence, Pop Will Eat Itself.[6]
I started to detail my idea with mashups in these three posts:
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1925 - "The Professor's Teddy Bear" by Theodore Sturgeon and other SF audio - New Thinkable
and
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1919 - Genre: High and Low Suspense
and
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1780 - "God is an Iron" by Spider Robinson
In post #1919, I wrote
I have been intrigued lately in a trend in genre fiction to "re-imagine" someone else's story, such as Victor LaValle's Ballad of Black Tom, which reimagines Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook" by subverting it. The story won many awards:
One of NPR's Best Books of 2016, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, the British Fantasy Award, the This is Horror Award for Novella of the Year, and a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Awards.
I had been thinking of a kind of mash up of ideas, re-mixed, re-imagined, and shuffled so as to avoid being overtly derivative.
I found the Spider Robinson story as I wrote in Post #1780, which was "God is an Iron" and I cannot believe that I had forgotten that line.
MY MASH UP idea takes off from what LaVelle did with Lovecraft. I start with a core idea from a single story. I rewrite that idea/story, drilling to its core, and re-imagining it. Next, I layer in more story elements from other sources or story inspirations say from news items, history, psychology, what have you, and I continue to mold and reshape the text until what I end up with is its own unique thing and even if the inspiring idea is still evident, it is now original and different enough to no be unethically derivative.
In so doing, I can shake off the rust I have with writing and take on a mash-up as a writing challenge, an exercise.
But, I haven't actually done one yet. So we'll see how well this works.
As it is, my first mash up may be to write the story I have been looking for which I could swear I read about the robot teddy bear nanny/governess that somehow manipulates a child (or children) to kill parents or a parent. That won't be a mash-up per se, though I am in the process of reading whatever robot-AI teddy bear stories I can find as explained in #1919 and #1925.
I was emboldened to share this article from the Writing Cooperative to show that I am not the only one thinking it's a useful exercise to re-envision someone else's story.
Thanks for tuning in.
So, first, POP WILL EAT ITSELF.
https://writingcooperative.com/retelling-as-a-way-of-improving-your-craft-and-creativity-7ee63764b4fe
Retelling as a Way of Improving Your Craft and Creativity
Working with a well-known tale can be more creative than you think
Telling a story that has already been told might not seem like the most creative thing to do, but retelling — telling old stories in a new way or with a twist — can be a fun way of improving your writing craft and training yourself to be a better writer.
Getting to know the classics and the craft
A good retelling is based on the original tale or book which means closely studying the piece you’re going to base your own piece of fiction on. Working with it will make you more aware of the story’s structure and its elements. You’ll train yourself to look for the technical side of writing, and become more aware of common tropes that have been used before and how they have been used.
If you struggle with looking at your stories from a more craft-oriented perspective, studying a classic story with a purpose of rewriting it might help you to overcome that difficulty.
Enhancing your creativity
If you want to write a retelling, you’ll be figuring out how it’s going to be following the old story in a new way. Will you put it in a new setting? Gender-swap the characters? Make it a different genre? This is a great way to unblock your creativity and stretch the boundaries of your imagination.
Can King Arthur’s story be told as a contemporary young adult fiction about a rebellious teenager? Which elements of the legend would have to be changed to fit in the big city setting? Which are crucial and you have to keep them, so that readers will recognize the original story resonating in yours? Altering elements of a known story into a new creation while preserving other parts of it can be a great way to stretch your creative muscle and can become a stepping stone for when you need to find solutions for your own story — when you search for exciting twists or try to find an interesting subplot to add flavor to a stale or cliche storyline.
Challenging yourself
Can Snow White work as a gritty detective story? It might veer from an actual retelling a little bit too much, but it’s definitely possible to have the prince in a role of a sleuth in a desperate need of money accepting a job from a scared your lady — her skin fair, and her hair black — who inherited an apple juice company, and who thinks her stepmother is after her. The challenge of working out how to link a fairy tale with a completely unrelated genre can be a great way to push yourself outside of your own mind’s limitations and breathe new ideas into your original stories as well, especially when you’re feeling like genre constraints are smothering you a bit too much.
Working with retelling can put you in the mindset of “everything can be made to work” and bring back joy to your creative process when you simply have fun figuring out what’s possible and how far can you go. Robin Hood in space? Why not? Sleeping beauty as a medical thriller? Bring it on! The sheer brainstorming of possibilities can enhance your creative perspectives tenfold.
Finding inspiration for your original works
Because working on a retelling as an exercise will boost your creativity, challenge your limits, and enable you to understand the craft of storytelling and character creation, it will ultimately help you with your own stories. With a good grasp on tropes and overused plot solutions, you’ll notice them in your own writing, and with your imagination already broader, you’ll be able to replace them with something less expected and more exciting. The longer you brainstorm, and the more you alter, the more the story becomes yours, even if its core can be still boiled down to a trope (but can’t all stories be?).
A well-rounded exercise
Perhaps you’re of the mindset that retelling isn’t as valuable as an original story. Or you might be of a mindset that there are already too many of them out there, and there’s no point of adding another one.
Yet, working on your own retelling will provide you with tools and insights that can become invaluable for you as a writer. You don’t even have to actually write that reinvented story: it’s enough to go through the initial steps, analyzing, speculating, brainstorming. So go ahead, give it a go. If nothing else, you might be able to put a bit of fun back into your writing process brainstorming all the ideas.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2007.01 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1825 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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