How to Write a Fairy Tale Retelling

A fairy tale retelling takes a story readers already know and rebuilds it — new setting, new interiority, new consequences — while keeping enough of the original that the recognition is part of the pleasure. The craft problem is a balance: keep too much and you have written a longer version of a story that was already finished; keep too little and you lose the recognition you were borrowing. This guide covers choosing a source, deciding what is load-bearing, the copyright question that trips up new writers, and the failure modes specific to the form.

Why retellings work

Fairy tales survive because they are compressed. A tale that has been told aloud for centuries has had everything inessential worn off it: motive, causation, interiority, moral ambiguity. What remains is situation and image — a girl in ashes, a bargain with a witch, a house made of bread. That compression is exactly what makes them good raw material. The original supplies the shape and the recognition; everything it left out is space for you to work in.

Readers of retellings are doing two things at once: following your story, and continuously comparing it to the one they already hold. That double reading is a real advantage. You get dramatic irony for free — the reader knows the stepsisters are trouble before your protagonist does — and every deviation is legible as a deliberate choice rather than a plot event. When your huntsman doesn't kill the girl, the reader feels the swerve, and you did not have to write a paragraph explaining that it mattered.

Choosing a source (and knowing what you're actually using)

Most writers pick a version without noticing. "Cinderella" is not one story; it is a tale type with hundreds of recorded variants. Folklorists index it as ATU 510A in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther classification, and one of the oldest written versions on record is not European at all: Ye Xian, recorded by Duan Chengshi in the ninth-century Tang compilation Youyang Zazu, in which a mistreated stepdaughter is helped by the bones of a fish she raised. The lost shoe and the identification test are both there; the slipper is gold rather than glass, and there is no fairy godmother. The elements you assumed were essential turn out to be one culture's version of them.

Three source families are worth knowing apart:

  • Charles Perrault, Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697) — the courtly French versions of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard and Puss in Boots, written for a salon audience and moralized at the end.
  • The Brothers Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen — first volume 1812, second volume 1815 (printed in late 1814 with an 1815 title page), gathered and then repeatedly rewritten across seven editions to 1857. Harsher, more rural, and often noticeably different from the Perrault version of the same tale.
  • Hans Christian Andersen — not a collector but an author. The Little Mermaid, published in Copenhagen in 1837, was not collected from folk tradition but written as a literary tale of his own — drawing on the older mermaid-and-soul material, Fouqué's Undine (1811) in particular — and much of Andersen's best-known work is literary fairy tale of that kind. The practical consequence for you is that his endings are one writer's choices rather than something worn smooth by generations of telling — so they can be argued with.

Read at least two variants of your tale before you outline. It is the fastest way to discover which elements are the story and which are one teller's decoration.

The old texts above are in the public domain and you may use them freely. What is protected is everything modern: a twentieth-century film's invented sidekicks, names, songs and visual designs are that studio's property, and so is a recent scholarly translation of an old tale, as a work in its own right. This matters more than it sounds, because most people's memory of "Cinderella" is a film's version rather than Perrault's. If your outline contains a talking mouse with a name, you are retelling the wrong source. Go to the old text — it is freely available — and build from there. (Copyright terms differ by country and this isn't legal advice; if you're publishing commercially and the boundary looks close, check the rules where you publish.)

What to keep and what to invert

The useful distinction is between the spine and the furniture.

The spine is what a reader would name if you asked what the tale is about: a mistreated girl who is transformed and then identified; a bargain that trades a voice for legs; a curse that sleeps a kingdom; a locked room you were told not to enter. Break the spine and the recognition goes with it.

The furniture is everything else — the pumpkin, the specific animals, the number of sisters, the ball. Furniture is where your version lives, and readers will forgive you almost anything you do to it.

Element Load-bearing? What you can do with it
The core situation Yes Transplant it wholesale into a new world; do not remove it
The bargain or prohibition Yes Change the terms, the price, and who offers it
The transformation Usually Make it technological, social, psychological — but keep the change
Named characters No Rename freely; the role is what readers recognize
Magical objects No Replace with anything that performs the same function
The ending No — and this is your best move Withhold it, invert it, or grant it at a cost the original never named

The three reliable strategies, in ascending order of ambition:

  1. Transplant. Keep the shape, change the world. Marissa Meyer's Cinder (2012) puts the Cinderella structure into a science-fiction city with a cyborg mechanic as its heroine — the recognition survives a total change of genre.
  2. Shift the point of view. Tell it from the stepmother, the beast, the witch, the wolf. This is the cheapest way to generate new material, because the original almost certainly gave that character no interiority at all, and whatever you invent is unfalsifiable.
  3. Extract the latent content. Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (1979) is the standing example — a collection reworking Perrault and others, written directly after Carter translated Perrault. Carter described her intention not as modernizing the tales but as taking the material already latent in them and using it to begin new stories. That is the most demanding approach and the one that produces books which outlive the trend.

Common mistakes

Retelling the film. Discussed above and the single most common error. It narrows you to one interpretation and puts you closest to material you do not own.

Explaining the source. Retellings run on recognition, which is instantaneous. A chapter establishing that this world has a Cinderella legend is a chapter of throat-clearing.

Keeping the original's morality by accident. Many collected tales encode assumptions — about obedience, beauty, punishment, who is allowed agency — that the teller never examined because they did not need to. If you carry those across unaltered, they will read as your position rather than the source's. Decide consciously which you are keeping.

A protagonist who is still passive. The original heroine often has no plan; she is acted upon and then rewarded. A novel-length protagonist cannot be. Giving her a want and a strategy is usually the largest single piece of invention a retelling requires.

Novelty in place of a story. "Cinderella, but in space" is a premise, not a plot. Once the transplant is done, you still owe the reader a book with its own stakes and its own inciting incident. If your version's only surprise is the setting, it is exhausted by chapter three.

Too many tales at once. Braiding four fairy tales into one novel sounds richer and reads thinner, because none of them gets the space to pay off its recognition.

What to track while drafting

Retellings generate an unusual amount of reference material: the source text itself, notes on which variant does what, a list of decisions about what you are keeping and what you are inverting, and the ordinary worldbuilding your new setting needs.

In Writer Studio that reference layer has somewhere to go that is not your manuscript. Notes are free-form book notes for the things that are neither draft nor wiki — research, sources, ideas, cut passages. A note opens as an editor tab and is edited like prose, it shows up in project search, and it can be linked to a place in your structure so a click takes you there. Crucially, note words are not counted toward your book's word count, goals or export, so you can paste an entire public-domain source tale into a note and keep it beside the draft without it inflating anything.

The decisions themselves belong in the Book Wiki, where you can define your own entry type — a card type with text, choice and list fields — for the tale's motifs: one card per borrowed element, recording what the source did, what you are doing instead, and why. Writer Studio is free, offline desktop software in active alpha; nothing in it will tell you whether an inversion works. But a retelling is a long argument with a source text, and having the source, the decisions and the draft in one project instead of three browser tabs is most of the battle — try it on your retelling.

Where to go next depends on which direction you're pulling the tale: