Have any of you heard about the new movie The Nativity Story? It is projected to do very well, much as The Passion of the Christ did a few years ago. But neither of these stories is original.

Have any of you heard of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist? It is a fast-read, sort of engaging, and a complete ripoff of one of the 1001 arabian nights tales. Yet, it has done well in international sales.

My question is this: What are your thoughts on taking well-established stories and re-telling them for fun and profit?

For example, there is a book of the Bible that I think could make an excellent novel and movie. It's not a well known story (sort of like the Esther movie that is out), but it is a good story with a clear hero, conflict, and storyline. Have any of you ever written anything like this? Is it like writing fan fiction, something I have never done? Didn't Anne Rice just re-tell Christ's nativity and flight into Egypt in her latest opus?

Also, philisophically speaking, is any story original? If nothing is original, then style really is everything and we might as well take Shakespeare's approach to maximize fun and profit. I mean, we should just re-tell old tales, and dress them up so dazzingly that five centuries hence the glitter of gold still holds the patina at bay.

(Metallurgists, forgive my mixed metaphors).
 

Part of the fun of doing it, for readers as well as for writers, is to bring new insights to the story, to try new perspectives, new points of view, new ways of looking at the same old same old.
 

I think one reason I've become less prolific in thie particular phase of my writing career is that I switched from concentrating on the "what" onto concentrating on the "how." I may not be writing as much, but I'm hopeful what I'm writing is better---ideally, different from anybody else's take on things.
 

But then, since one of my projects is rewriting the Norse myths (and interpolating some pieces of my own to further "illuminate" them), I might be biased.
 

Books fade, stories live.

[This message has been edited by Pyre Dynasty (edited November 30, 2006).]
 

_The 13th Warrior_ by Michael Crichton is also based on "Beowulf", from what I hear.

C.S. Lewis wrote _Till We Have Faces_, a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, and I think it's brilliant -- a wonderful story with a true and deeply felt theological point, but that isn't preachy at all.

There have been numerous retellings of the King Arthur legend, including movies, ranging from fantasy (_Excalibur_) to a form of historical fiction (_King Arthur_). (Loved the former, disliked the latter.)

I'm sloooowly working on my own Arthurian retelling -- the danger being that it has to be familiar without being trite. That's tough! And I think that's the point. All of the things mentioned here (I haven't read _The 13th Warrior_, though) were familiar and yet unique. If you can hit both of those wickets, I think retelling old tales is fine.

Now, I love ancient stories of a variety of types, and there's a market for retellings that are very close to the originals (Kevin Crossley-Holland's collection of Norse Myths comes to mind), but that's different from the novels I've mentioned. The former are considered retellings (at least, they were marketed as such and I perceived them as such) first, and are typically more episodic, while the latter are marketed as novels first and the retelling aspect is more of a hook or concept.

Rambling now. Should go.

Oliver
 

There's no original ideas, but there are original stories. Much of the originality in stories depends on how you combine ideas together, and what happens when you do.

As for style, I don't think it matters all that much. It's something you'll end up with eventually, but except for poetry, I've never read anything and thought, That was a great style! What's more important is telling a story everybody can understand.
 

Sometimes it's conscious, sometimes simple inspiration is consciously taken, sometimes it is an unconscious process by which the author's mind delves into his own memory data banks for fragments of this and fragments of that for inspiration.

A couple years ago we had a Rewrite Challenge going around here. We'd read and rewrite fairy tales, looking for that unique angle that would make a story all our own, or even simply retelling the tale in, as has been mentioned before,a new way. Our first challenge was on the Three Billy Goats Gruff.

The variety of stories inspired by the skeleton (or even the blood and body) of the Gruff story astounded, I think, all those who participated.

My point is that retelling old stories seldom grows tiresome, because those stories have survived for so long for a very good reason. They speak to humankind. And writing any story that speaks to us is never a bad thing.
 

Superman, Batman, and Spiderman all could be more easily compared to Cinderella than to Robin Hood, once you consider that Cinderella is a transforming magical girl (i.e. a specialized superhero) and Robin Hood is a criminal.
 

Superman's story owes a lot to early science fiction and pulp hero magazines...a destroyed planet and a spaceship journey...powers like great strength and agility and X-ray vision...fighting in a costume...

Even the name "Superman" isn't original. I gather it was coined by Nietzche, in a different context, as Ubermensch in German and translated into English as "Super-Men." ("Over-men" or "Upper-men" might be more accurate, but my German isn't good enough to be sure...besides, I've never read Nietzche, only read accounts of him, and am not even certain I've spelled his name right.)
 

There is a strong "Cinderella" aspect to his story as it eventually evolved, particularly the romatic dicotomy between Clark Kent and Superman's relationship with Louis Lane.
 

Lynda