Fairy Tales
Steal the old stories back and tell them slant.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about fairy tales: retelling techniques, imagery, common mistakes, plus exercises, prompts and a quiz in this free guide by Writory.
What this theme is
Fairy tale poems borrow stories the reader already knows, the wolf, the spindle, the shoes that fit, and use that shared knowledge as a springboard. Because nobody needs the plot explained, the poem is free to spend its lines elsewhere: inside the stepmother's head, in the forest after the children have gone home, at the wedding nobody quite believes in. The tale supplies the skeleton; the poem supplies the nervous system.
At their best these poems are not nostalgia but interrogation. Fairy tales encode old ideas about obedience, beauty, punishment and reward, and a poem can crack any of those open. Who benefits from the happy ending? What did the granted wish actually cost? The tale is the question the culture asked; your poem is permitted to disagree with the answer.
Why poets return to it
Retelling is one of the fastest routes to originality, oddly enough, because the reader can measure your version against the inherited one and feel exactly where you turned. That visible swerve is creativity a judge can point to; in a contest scored on creativity, emotion, structure, language and theme, as Writory's monthly contest is, a sharp retelling shows its work on every criterion at once.
Where it comes from
Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, published in 1862, is a fairy tale that never existed until she wrote it: goblin fruit, a sister's sacrifice, an ending that critics have argued over for a century and a half. Keats gave the tradition one of its darkest ballads in La Belle Dame sans Merci, a knight enchanted, drained and abandoned on a cold hillside.
In the twentieth century the retelling became its own genre. Anne Sexton's Transformations rewired the Grimm tales with sardonic wit and modern damage, and Carol Ann Duffy handed the microphone to the women standing at the edges of the old stories. The lesson from all of them: the tale survives by being argued with.
The elements that carry it
- Forests, paths and doors: the geography of choice, temptation and no-turning-back.
- Transformation objects, apples, mirrors, spindles, cloaks, each one a hinge where a life changes state.
- The rule of three: three wishes, three trials, three knocks, a rhythm the ear expects and the poet can exploit or break.
- Domestic items gone ominous, an oven, a comb, a red hood, because fairy tale fear lives close to home.
- The teller's voice itself: once, long ago, in a certain kingdom, an incantation that signals the contract between speaker and listener.
Techniques that work
- Change the point of view: let the wolf, the witch or the overlooked middle sister narrate, and the familiar plot becomes new evidence.
- Relocate the tale to the present, a job centre, a tower block, a dating app, and keep exactly one magical element literal.
- Break the expected ending. Stop the poem a moment before the rescue, or continue it a year after the wedding.
- Use the tale's structure as your form: three trials can become three stanzas, and the third can refuse to behave.
- Trust understatement with the violence. Fairy tales report terrible things in a calm voice, and that calm is scarier than any gore.
Mistakes to avoid
- Retelling the plot beat by beat with no new angle. Fix: find the one scene the original skips and live there.
- Winking irony that sneers at the tale. Mockery is cheap; the strong poems take the old story seriously enough to wound it.
- Bolting a moral onto the end. The Grimms already did that; your reader wants the wound, not the bandage.
- Generic enchanted-forest wallpaper. Name the trees, the smell of the goblin fruit, the exact colour of the cloak.
An exercise
Choose a fairy tale you knew before you could read. List its characters, then write a poem narrated by the one with the fewest lines in the original, beginning at the moment the famous plot ends.
A challenge
Over five days, retell one tale five ways: as a police report, a love poem, a recipe, a voicemail, and a lullaby. Keep the same three key images in every version and watch what each form does to them.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem in which a fairy tale character quietly returns something they took, the beans, the voice, the firstborn, and explains, without apologising, why they needed it at the time.
Before you submit
- The poem assumes the reader knows the tale and spends no lines on summary.
- At least one familiar image appears in an unfamiliar light.
- The point of view or timeframe differs from the original in a purposeful way.
- No moral is stated; any judgement is carried by image and tone.
- The ending surprises someone who knows how the story is supposed to end.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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