Mastodawn

Colorblind Cowboy Jun 7, 2025

@allisonwyss Thank you for sharing this. There’s a lot in here I’ve been dealing with in my short story collection, which has two folk retellings/recastings.

I agree about anachronisms. It’s one of the things that makes a modern retelling so compelling, but also fraught. In your example, it seems important to make sure the reader recognizes the contrast in times. I ended up adding a framing device to one of mine for a variety of reasons, a father telling the reworked Briar Rose to his daughter

Frame stories are super useful in fairy tales and folktales and retellings. I think they do the same thing as anachronisms, as other "voicy" strategies (and there are lots) and it's to see up that layered story. There's the what's happening in the tale and then there's the teller who is sort of like another story happening at the same time.

@colorblindcowboy When you set up a frame, there's also this opportunity to let the listener (inside the story) ask questions and make suggestions and just collaborate in the telling. I love that for so many reasons. It makes that extra layer of story, but it also reiterates that these stories are collaborations. It invites the reader in too.

@allisonwyss I agree. And we also get to consider more blatantly the veracity of the narrator, their motives for telling it, and the effect on the in-narrative listener(s).

Framed stories are just a big narrative turn-on for me.

Colorblind Cowboy Jun 7, 2025

@allisonwyss A question that arose for me in another is — and I’m curious your take on it — : in a modern re-casting of a folk tale, how do we handle the idea of whether the tale has existed before?

Do we live in a world where the tale already exists and the characters are repeating a pattern? Or is this the first instance of it in the 2000s?

I don’t believe there’s a single answer, but it’s one I struggle with conceptually.

I think it can work either way, but I love when it feels like it has already existed. It adds this layer of "subtext I don't get" somehow that can make a thing feel both authentic and mysterious at the same time. Like it's known, just not known by me. Or something like that.

Also! How have you been?!!! It's been ages since we talked!!

@allisonwyss I know! I ran away for a bit to buy a house and move. Which ultimately resulted in 21 short stories.

That's amazing.

Congratulations on the house and the stories!

@allisonwyss Thank you! Revisions happening on both.

Oh wait! I misunderstood your question. I thought you were talking about when it's a new bit of folklore invented for the world.

But I still like either way. I often think about how sometimes a retelling is cast in an alternate universe is exactly like ours except those particular characters haven't existed yet. But that's just silliness.

But also either way you go, I think it really helps to hash it out for yourself & decide what you think is true for your characters.

Like, sometimes you get some lovely little metafictional play where the characters themselves realize they're in a retelling, realize they're playing the parts of fairy tale figures who came before. I think that metafictional play (many kinds of metafictional play) are common and lovely in retellings.

And then there's also very often the sense that "oh, you heard a different version? Well, this is the real one" as in this only happened once and maybe it was this way and maybe it was that. And the various versions layer in a way that creates richness.

But that layering of versions to create a remarkable richness happens _FOR THE READER_ whether or not it happens for the characters.

And mostly the concern is whether the characters in the frame story know old versions, but it can also be whether the actual fairy tale characters know it, though usually they don't.

I'm just rambling now.

But also, I've been reading some subversive retellings of bible stories and imo opinion it REALLY matters if i understand them to be happening in a world where the original stories are known or not. It seems to influence how I interpret god in the stories, as sort of a given or as a mystery.

And so I haven't thought this through, but I wonder if a similar thing might happen to more traditional fairy tales but not about god , but about the magic. Not sure.

@allisonwyss Whether there’s a god in-universe is a whole kettle of worms in itself.

I think there’s some difference in that magic can be a localized phenomenon, perhaps. It may not have to affect the whole cosmology — while a deus gives us a complex and over-arching machina.

I’ll have to think about that.

Well, let me think. In fairy tales there is usually normalized magic, meaning everyone knows they're in a world where magic exists (they don't know the rules of the magic--no one really does--they may be surprised at how it plays out--but they know magic is real). That's my question in some of these bible retellings. It's clearly a surprise that these miracles DO happen, but is it a surpise that they CAN?

When magic happens and everyone says--oh my god, a talking frog?!! What the hell!? --then it's a different sort of magic. (Not that retellings don't play with denormalizing magic all the time.
They do!)

@allisonwyss That’s a really good question. It does seem to me miracles act on the element of surprise. Maybe we only think miracles were normalized in biblical times (texts) because we have a bible that tells us of so many.

Yeah, I remember asking about that as a kid--If these stories are real, why did miracles happen all the time then but not now?--and the answer I got (which is maybe back to the original thing of this thread!) is that it's because time is compressed.

@allisonwyss I probably heard the same thing then.

But it's like, maybe anachronisms exist because we're taking all the magical wonders that occured over thousands of years, and putting them into a single fairy tale. So of course artifacts from various periods bump up against each other.

A frequent strategy of storytelling, generally, is to twist the chronic into something acute so it feels more holdable. So we can LOOK at it.

We take a lifelong tension and spin it up to a single, explosive moment. Something gradual feels almost abstract. Making it happen in a single moment makes it seem more concrete.

And then too. What about the magic of the world (the kind science tells us is "real")? Much of it is slow moving, but if we do a time lapse video, say, of various natural phenomenon, they are goddamn miracles.

Or, say, the Beast didn't magically turn back into a prince but over time, the magic is that Belle loved hiim anyway--for a really cheesy example. But that doesn't make as good a _scene_. So. Speed it up narratively, and--poof!--magic.

@allisonwyss Well, I wrote a story about the downstream economic effects of a fairy tale character’s actions, so I’m ok with that sort of demystification.

Oh yeah. And I love the stories that unpack things like this. I actually think that because fairy tales normalize and stylize and mystify so much, that it creates the special invitation to dig into those places when we retell. It's part of how they make a conversation. I'll leave this part out, wink wink, so maybe you can fill it in yourself.

@allisonwyss Zora Neale Hurston called Moses the greatest hoodoo man in history, and did a whole revisionary take on Exodus that casts him as such. There’s still a god, who’s rather overbearing, but the miracles are more a function of Moses’ conjuring.

Oh yeah! I haven't read it, but probably should.

@allisonwyss I think this is true. Also the other way, taking something to its extreme, blowing it up — which I guess is also what rumor does. And how miracles (maybe) get started.

And sometimes that's the same thing. Making something constant and nagging but small into something that is extreme and all-at-once. The project is to surface whatever hard-to-grasp thing so we can just sort of deal with it.

I think it's sometimes why complex systems (of oppression, say) are (sometimes) condensed into a singular super villain. It's a fine way to make the obscured evil into something we can see--as long as it remains clear that the simplified version represents something more complex. The risk is when it flattens the real evil to something simple. And the same with heroes. But maybe even more dangerous.

@allisonwyss True. Which is why “The Lottery” disturbed people so much. Shirley knew how to distribute evil.

Oh my god. Yes! (Can I use your insight when I teach about this? It's such a good example, and from a story so many know--I wish I'd thought of it mysefl.)

But yeah, what fun to think about how _rumors_ work. I mean, of course that's what oral storytelling is and it's how fairy tales work. It's how memes work. You have to make it better or bigger of meaner or more explosive or more beautiful or more magical with each telling so your version is remembered.

@allisonwyss Yeah. I mean, there’s a reason these stories are important to us. They are archetypes and we tend to play out Cain and Able, the Prodigal Son, etc. in real life, over and over again. These stories did not invent family dynamics.

So the modern story could be the first time it’s ever happened. However it’s hard to imagine we could have arrived in our exact same world without these Judeo-Christian underpinnings.

Right. It's not that hard to imagine a world where, say, Sherlock Holmes never existed as a story (and so the new version can be sort of fresh). But it's truly wild to imagine a world in which nobody ever believed in that particular god.

@allisonwyss Yeah. Or even when you watch Hamlet set in the 21st century. Sure. It’s just a setting. But how could our world exist in the same way without Hamlet’s affect on how we understand ourselves?

(I’m with Harold Bloom on Shakespeare inventing us — which some may not agree with).

Yes, exactly. So it starts to feel like Hamlet must actually know he's Hamlet as he's Hamletting. Because surely he knows the story--or if not, at least it's a known a type to him.

Though it's possible the very first Hamlet already had main character syndrome.

@allisonwyss Oh, quite!

@allisonwyss Exactly. He certainly knows he’s acting on some level. Oh the plays within plays!

@allisonwyss no. Not a ramble. This is exactly what I was considering.

@allisonwyss Yes. And I do agree with that alternate universe thing in a way. I don’t think it’s silly at all.

It’s actually a tough thing to decide and consider the consequences both ways. What I decided allows for ambiguity, but I had to have a knock down and drag out fight with myself first.