I am excited to have Kate Sheeran Swed with me today and we are talking about retelling a classic. I have been fascinated by retellings for a while now and though I have not read many, I am curious to learn about the process of writing one! A little bit about Kate first:
Kate loves hot chocolate, plastic dinosaurs, and airplane tickets. She has trekked along the Inca Trail to Macchu Picchu, hiked on the Mýrdalsjökull glacier in Iceland, and climbed the ruins of Masada to watch the sunrise over the Dead Sea. She holds degrees in music from the University of Maine and Ithaca College, as well as an MFA in Fiction from Pacific University. Her stories are forthcoming or have appeared in the Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide Volume 5, Daily Science Fiction, Electric Spec, and Andromeda Spaceways.
Kate, welcome to The Creator’s Roulette! What do you love about classics and what appeal do they hold in today’s world?
Thanks so much for having me!
People certainly define classics in different ways, which I think makes a difference in how they appeal to the world at large. For me a classic is often something that remains relevant beyond the time it was written. Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen? Their themes and characters resonate past the centuries they lived in. We read those books, and we still recognize people we know. We might find humor in a comedy of errors, or regret that class and economic privilege still define so much of our world. And I think that ultimately, we carry their stories with us. I studied music performance in college, and I’d always keep a copy of Great Expectations on my music stand whenever I performed. That’s how much it mattered to me. If I couldn’t see myself in the characters, I don’t think I’d have felt so passionately about it.
As another example of what really defines a classic for me, Octavia Butler’s Kindred came out in 1979 — not so long ago, relatively, and yet it helped define the science fiction genre in such a way that it’s indisputably a classic. So I like that the definition of ‘classic’ changes depending on the person, the genre, the audience.
How is a retelling different from the original story? Also, how is it similar to the original story?
The infuriating answer is that it depends. Some retellings match the original works beat for beat — we see that a lot with fairy tale retellings, which makes some sense. The classics generally being longer, there’s a lot of room to play.
One of my favorite ways to retell a classic is to take the story from a side character’s point of view — like Kiersten White does in the Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein. Her story keeps pretty faithfully to the original Frankenstein, but it tells us a side we never saw — and adds an intriguing twist or two along the way. Another way to approach a retelling is to pick up a story and place it in a new context, as Ibi Zoboi did with her most excellent Pride and Prejudice retelling, Pride.
I did both with Parting Shadows; I let the Miss Havisham-inspired artificial intelligence pick up part of the narrative, and gave the rest to Estella (Astra, in my book). I also placed them all in space. Which was fun.
What kind of research do you have to do to write a retelling? What role does the genre of the retelling play in the research?
For me, a lot of the research was in
1) rereading and making notes on the original work; and
2) asking myself the same questions this interview started with. What makes this story resonate into today’s world? More particularly, because I’m the author and I have to follow my own curiosity, why is this story so stuck in my mind that I feel the need to explore it more deeply?
Great Expectations is one of my favorite books of all time, and for years I hated Estella with a passion. I shook my head at fallible Pip, certainly, and I related to his struggles. But it was a long time before I saw Estella as the abused daughter that Dickens meant for us to see. And I do think he meant for us to see that, though maybe I’m just projecting my modern views. In any case, it was a long time before I realized that we see Estella through Pip’s eyes, and we can’t take all his opinions as pure truths.
I became obsessed with this change within my own interpretation of the book, and I wanted more Estella. And more Miss Havisham, too. So a lot of my research was about answering questions within my own heart. Sounds a little cheesy, I guess, but that’s where a lot of my stories come from. I did also read other retold classics to see how other authors approached it.
Because I decided to divert my stories from the original when necessary — when you lift the book out of its time and place it in space, and plan a series around it, you kind of have to — I chose that flexibility. With something that sticks more closely to an original tale (like Elizabeth Frankenstein) I’d imagine the author would need to do more in-depth research and plot analysis to get the details right.
What is the toughest part about writing a retelling?
This is actually directly related to the above answer. At first, I wasn’t sure how much I should divert from the original. Ultimately, all three books in the trilogy take off pretty far from their inspired works — Parting Shadows sticks closest in terms of theme and even some of the plot beats. Phantom Song (based on Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera) holds onto some themes and a few of the more fun aspects of the Phantom, but the plot moves off rather quickly, and the romance is F/F.
I often say that the third book, Prodigal Storm, kind of… waves to Treasure Island as it passes by. I wouldn’t even necessarily call that one a retelling 🙂 Because by the time I reached book 3, I’d built an entire world — and a connected story that needed resolving. I didn’t have a whole lot of room for Long John Silver, though the references are there. Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles even kind of reaches that point with Winter, the final book; even though it does touch the beats of Snow White, I know as a reader I was as invested in the outcomes for the other characters and the main conflict of the series by the time I got to that point.
Do you think retellings are a kind of fan fiction?
Oh my gosh, I love this question. I think they definitely can be! Why not? Fan fiction can definitely do the same thing that any retelling does. It lets us examine stories we love through a lens that may relate more directly to us. Whether that means exploring romantic relationships that aren’t canon, or telling side stories and adding adventures, I think it’s a way to process our feelings about a work and explore our own curiosity around it.
For all us retelling fans and apart from the books mentioned above, are there any other noteworthy retellings that you love?
- Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynne Anderson
- Pride by Ibi Zoboi
- Brightly Burning by Alexa Donne
- A Blade So Black by L.L. McKinney
- Forest of a Thousand Lanterns by Julie C. Dao (OK, OK, this is a fairytale retelling but it is so magnificent that I’d love to include it, too.)
Do you have any favorite classic retellings?
I hope you enjoyed this conversation about retellings with Kate! You can find her on Goodreads, Instagram and Twitter. Be sure to check out Parting Shadows which is part of our Armed With a Bingo giveaway for this quarter!
Banner image from Unsplash.
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