What Is a Fairy Tale Retelling?
Quick answer: Fairy tale retellings explained: how writers reinvent Cinderella, Bluebeard and more, why the form endures, and how to write a retelling that adds something new.
A fairy tale retelling is a new story built openly on the skeleton of an existing tale: Cinderella, Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood. The writer keeps enough recognisable bones, the slipper, the forbidden room, the wolf, for readers to hear the original underneath, then changes something decisive: the point of view, the era, the ending, the moral, the genre, or whose side we are on.
The form matters because it is one of the most commercially and artistically alive corners of fiction, from Angela Carter's story collections to bestselling novel series, and because it teaches a core craft truth: familiarity is not the enemy of originality. A retelling wins or loses on the gap between what readers expect and what you give them.
The longer answer: what counts, and what the change must do
Retelling sits on a spectrum. At one end is the straight modernisation, the same plot in new clothes: Cinderella in a Silicon Valley internship. In the middle are perspective flips, the story told by the stepmother, the wolf, the beast, which recategorise villains and victims. Further along are continuations and prequels, what happened after happily ever after, and at the far end are deconstructions that keep only a motif and interrogate the tale's assumptions: why do these stories punish curious women? Who profits from the bargain economy of wishes?
Two things make a retelling more than a costume change. First, the new element must generate new meaning, not just novelty. Setting Snow White on a space station is decoration unless the mirror, envy and preserved beauty mean something different in orbit. Second, the retelling should exploit the reader's foreknowledge. Because your audience knows the wolf is in the bed, you can build dread openly, delay, subvert or detonate the expected beat. Dramatic irony comes free with the form; the craft is in spending it well.
A useful honesty: fairy tales themselves were never fixed. The Grimms revised their own collection repeatedly, and 'Cinderella' exists in hundreds of variants across cultures, including Yeh-Shen in ninth-century China. Retelling is not a modern trick performed on stable originals; it is how these stories have always lived.
Retellings worth reading
Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (1979) is the form's high-water mark: Bluebeard, Beauty and Red Riding Hood retold in lush, dangerous prose that drags the tales' buried sexuality and violence into the light. In the title story, the rescuing hero is the bride's pistol-carrying mother, one changed beat that rewrites the whole moral. Robin McKinley's Beauty and Marissa Meyer's Cinder, a cyborg Cinderella, show the form working for younger audiences and in science fiction respectively.
Gregory Maguire's Wicked demonstrates the villain-perspective flip at novel scale, using Oz to examine how societies manufacture wickedness. Helen Oyeyemi's Mr Fox braids the Bluebeard tale through a metafictional duel between an author and his imagined muse. Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver deepens Rumpelstiltskin with moneylending, ice fairies and three interlocking heroines. Reading across these, one lesson repeats: each writer identified what the original tale was quietly about, obedience, appetite, bargains, and made the quiet thing loud.
Writing your own retelling
Choose a tale that bothers you. Irritation is better fuel than affection: the question you cannot stop asking, why does the little mermaid trade her voice, what did the miller's daughter feel being bartered, is the engine of your version. List the tale's non-negotiable beats, the images readers will expect, then decide which three you will keep, which you will twist and which you will refuse. That decision grid is effectively your outline.
Pick your lever: new narrator, new setting, new genre, new ending, or the same events at a different life stage. One lever, pulled hard, beats four pulled gently. Ground the magic in specifics; fairy tales float in 'once upon a time', but your retelling gains power from Tuesday afternoons, named towns, rent, weather. And reread the oldest version you can find, not the animated one, since the originals are stranger and darker than their reputations, and the strangeness is where fresh retellings hide. Short forms suit this genre beautifully, and a 2,000-word ceiling, which is what Writory's monthly story contest allows, is roughly the natural size of a tale told with one sharp twist.
Common mistakes
The commonest failure is the costume change: new setting, identical meaning, so the story adds nothing but scenery. The second is subversion as reflex, flipping the tale's morality simply because flipping is expected; making the villain sympathetic is now so standard that the truly surprising move is sometimes to keep them monstrous and examine why we need them so.
Third, over-reliance on reader knowledge: if your story collapses for someone who has never met the original, the story is a footnote, not a tale. It must stand alone. Fourth, copyright confusion. The old tales are public domain, but specific modern versions are not; a retelling can use the Grimms' Snow White freely, while a film studio's named dwarfs, songs and visual inventions are off-limits. Build from the folk source, not the franchise.
What poets can take from this
- Retell the tale that irritates you; the unanswered question is your engine.
- List the expected beats, then decide deliberately: keep, twist or refuse each one.
- Pull one big lever, such as narrator, era or ending, rather than four small ones.
- Anchor the magic in concrete, dated, priced reality.
- Make the story work for a reader who has never met the original.
- Source from the old public-domain versions, never from modern film franchises.
Try it yourself
Retell Hansel and Gretel from the point of view of the witch's house itself, built by magic to be irresistible and unable to warn anyone of anything. Keep the breadcrumbs, the oven and the cage, but let the house choose the ending.
Questions
Are fairy tale retellings legal to publish?
Yes, when based on the traditional tales, which are public domain. Trouble starts only if you copy protected modern elements, such as a studio's character designs, invented names or song lyrics. Work from Grimm, Perrault or Andersen and you are safe.
What is the difference between a retelling and being inspired by a fairy tale?
A retelling keeps the recognisable structure or beats of a specific tale and expects readers to notice. Inspired-by fiction borrows atmosphere, motifs or themes without mapping onto one source story. Both are legitimate; they simply promise different things.
Which fairy tales are retold most often?
Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Bluebeard lead the pack, largely because their central images are so strong. Less-worn tales, like The Snow Queen, The Juniper Tree or regional stories, offer writers fresher ground.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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