Long before the written word was invented, humans were telling each other stories.

In fact, humans have been telling stories for so long that we’ve come up with every variation of a story there is. Whether your dystopian protagonist is fighting a faceless government corporation (man vs. society), your pre-historic antagonist is struggling through a winter (man vs nature), or even your sci-fi computer hacker is facing an omnipotent AI (man vs. machine), humans have told so many stories that every story has been told in one way shape or another.

That doesn’t mean you need to give up or worry you aren’t telling a new story. In fact, it means quite the opposite. It means that you have even more places to draw inspiration from. Humans have been telling stories for so long that we’ve reinvented them hundreds, if not thousands of times over.

Retelling a story is not a new practice.  Some stories have been retold so often that we recognize them from a few key elements. When the young woman bravely dons a red cape to enter the woods, we immediately connect it to Red Riding Hood. Two lovers, forbidden to be together by family or social status brings Romeo and Juliet to mind.

This makes retellings a powerful tool for any writer. So powerful in fact, that entire genres exist because readers can’t get enough of these stories. Romances dominate markets, precisely for this reason.

Familiar Story Structure

One of the big reasons retellings are so popular is because they often follow a pattern. If you struggle to build a solid story structure, rewriting a familiar story can help teach cadence and flow within a story structure.

Fairytales, for instance, often follow the ‘three trials’ structure. In this structure, characters must attempt their task or goal three times, only achieving full success (or failure, in the case of many antagonists) on the third and final attempt. This is a structure that’s still in use today even among novels.

By retelling these common stories and myths, writers are exercising story structuring skills and practicing flow and pacing. This makes retellings perfect for any writer, beginner or advanced, to help refine plotting skills.

As an exercise: Pick your favorite fairytale and rewrite it as if it had happened to you in your childhood.

Ways Retellings Inspire

Classic stories can provide inspiration in a number of different ways. They might provide a new twist or use a familiar setting to explore a new theme. They become even more powerful when you combine and rearrange the characters and settings in all new ways. Finding a way to refresh an old story is easy as looking at each story and asking questions.

Finding New Twists

You might have seen the viral tumblr post about how Snow White would look like a vampire with her snow white skin and blood red lips. This is just one example of how adding a twist to a story doesn’t need to be hard. It can start with an observation. Snow White’s original description is very vampire like with pale skin, red lips and even dark hair. An observation of similarities between two separate ideas.

That one observation sparked a viral post and had plenty of other people chiming in with reasons why the original tale backed up the twist. It also shows that some of the best twists are the easiest to find.  One way to do this might be to make a comparison chart of two ideas you like, and write down the ways they’re similar.

Another popular twist is to explore what happens after the original tale concludes, often by tackling how children of classical characters deal with the weight of their parents’ tales. Although some mythologies provide endings to the stories (and sometimes to the characters themselves) there are often gaps that can still be explored. Looking for those gaps and using your imagination to fill them in can lead to inspiration for dozens of stories.

As an exercise: Pick one mythical creature and one fairytale. Write a comparison chart between the creature and the main character.

Changing Settings

Although many of the classic tales have classical settings, when we bring the story to a new location we often have to make adjustments for that new setting. Take the story of Medusa for this example. In classical Greece, her hiding in a temple to Athena makes sense, but if we’re to bring the most famous Gorgon into Victorian England, we have to find a place for her to reasonably hide.

Many fanfiction writers will probably recognize this as the use of Alternative Universes or ‘AU’ where the characters stay the same, but the world around them changes. There are thousands of options to bring characters into new universes. You might set your Shakespearean play in a modern High School for instance. By adding new constraints around a classical story, you push the characters and their troubles to work within the constraints of the setting.

This also gives you the chance to explore new themes within the story. A modern Red Riding Hood might be more terrifying for parents as their sweet child is snatched away doing something as safe as checking on her grandmother. A modern Riding Hood might even pose more of a challenge for your ‘Wolf’ and can drive her story in a new direction as she thwarts the attempts to eat her and her grandmother.

Changing Characters

Going back to the example of a vampiresque Snow White, we also come around to the idea that the characters in a retelling can be flexed as well. This might be as simple as giving them a a new flaw or a different personality. If your Cinderella just decides to run away from home while her stepfamily is off to the ball, you suddenly have a different story on your hands. In this example, she wouldn’t be content for one night at the ball, and she’d be driven to go get it.

You can also try swapping characters around. If perhaps say, instead of her father, it was Cinderella’s stepmother that had died, leaving them with a stepsister. Imagining that Cinderella is still the kind, sweet Cinderella who doesn’t abuse her stepsister, you now have to figure out how to get Cinderella and her stepsister into their original roles, or you have to figure out how to make the events of the original story unfold with the new leading lady and what might motivate her first to go to the ball and then to run away from the prince.

Combining Stories

If you noticed the last two sections didn’t have an exercise for you, congrats on your observation skills. That’s because this section deals with how you go about changing both settings and characters, but still have a retelling.

The simple answer is to swap characters or settings with another story.

You can easily swap out characters of the same style of story. Explore how Snow White and Cinderella might have to solve one another’s story and what tricks they might use from their original tales. You can also combine stories of the same style by once again changing setting slightly to imagine how the child of two different stories might have to contend with the same pitfalls as one of their parents.

Style or genre doesn’t have to limit your combination options either. Medusa would again, be a fearful opponent, but putting her in Red Riding Hood’s story creates openings for multiple options. Whether you make Medusa into Riding Hood or the Wolf can help inform how the story unfolds from there.

As an exercise: Make two lists for, one for character and one for setting. Next pick out three myths, fairytales or classical stories in any combination and write down their characters and settings on the appropriate lists. Then, pick out one character and one setting to combine. Write a short story about your new combination.

Bonus: you can use the events of the third story as your story structure.

What stories did you combine? Let me know in the comments below!