Retelling Stories

Pottery depicting legendary heroes like Achilles. This vase also happened to be the cover of my Western Art History textbook in college, reinforcing its continued influence on art today.

I remember entering my second and final semester of creative writing that I took in college. It was the first day, and the teacher, a lean, beady-eyed man with hair reminiscent of a disheveled Komondor handed out a sheet listing all the words and stories that he didn’t want to see written. “I’ve seen it too many times,” he said of stories taking place in college dorms or any mention of house parties. “What even is sheepish? I dare you to try to ‘stride into a room.’ That’s not how it’s done!” Clearly, time had been cruel to this cruel man, tiring him out of a position that he stopped

loving years ago. The repetition he found trite, overused, stacking up into a litany of pet

peeves.

Repetition, however, is foundational to storytelling.

On the sentence level, the repetition of words can lend weight to a story. I recently reread John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and noticed the number of times the word 'dust' was repeated in the first chapter, setting up the dust bowl. By repeating the word so often, it lent the heavy, weighted feel of all of the dust settling over crops onto our own ears. I know scholars have also noted the number of times 'time' is mentioned in The Great Gatsby.

Beyond that, stories are constantly being recycled. While humans certainly find comfort occasionally in repetition, stories can easily become tiring or outdated over time. Thankfully, there are a handful of strategies to revive tired tales.

Classic Greek tales like The Iliad and Roman foundational tales like The Rape of the Sabines, shown above, have been immortalized in many art forms over the centuries

One of the clearest ways to freshen up an old story is to adapt it into a more digestible medium. The Odyssey, though near and dear to my heart because of a freshman honors course I took from the lovely Sharon James, is a perfect example of how something even thousands of years old can still resonate with audiences.

One could definitely argue, though, that The Odyssey has never not been popular. People are always studying it in school. And there is validity to that point. I think that is the essence of the story’s appeal and part of what lends a story timelessness: themes and characters that we continue to relate to, an admiration for the creativity and structure or worldbuilding.

Classic art like the Venus de Milo has inspired arts and forms after it.

Even then, however, certain adjustments were made to improve its chances with this modern retelling. It had a large budget for visually capturing the story. The character of Odysseus was cleaned up to look like a less fallible hero. They drew scenes from the sacking of Troy, which technically are not recounted in the epic poem, but grant a bit of conversation with Homer’s Iliad, which deals a lot more with the traumas of war and the guilt of surviving.

While touching upon both The Iliad and retellings, I would be remiss to ignore the phenomenal Song of Achilles, which proves how well someone can take an old tale and mold it into something powerful and fresh. Madeline Miller took old and sometimes awkward moments, like Achilles getting discovered within a temple of all women by Odysseus, and tweaked them in just the right way to be cohesive.

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Sometimes adaptations and modern takes can challenge the original work, invert its intentions, or reflect modern times better. Take, for example, Manet's Olympia vs Titian's Venus of Urbino

Indeed, though, part of the joy lay in finding the similarities. Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead makes a fine companion piece to Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. Although it stands on its own, they build upon one another, and I think Charles Dickens would be very proud of how well Kingsolver managed to use his story and point it toward another poor and too-often neglected strata of people. It’s nothing like a lazy cash grab rehashing of a story told before: it’s an incredible thought experiment of “if this story took place today, how would it happen?”

There are a few books that I think could use a similar freshening up. And it falls in line with what a different creative writing teacher in college once said: whatever story you’re going to tell, a version of it, whether you know it or not, has been told before. In that case, it’s better to know who came up with the idea first and see how you can contribute something fresh to that tale.

We may also consider how Shakespearean tales (several aspects of which were stolen from the older classic Decameron) have themselves been transformed into movies like West Side Story and other plays like the one I was in once, Shakespeare in Love