The Art of the Retelling | 5 Rules for Reimagining Folklore
Part 5 of Feline Folklore: A Master Class with Charlie Creed
Every writer working with folklore, fairy tales, or myth faces the same question:
Do I honor the source or do I blow it up?
The answer isn't one or the other. It's knowing which approach serves your story—and executing it with intention.
A faithful retelling can be just as powerful as a radical reimagining, but they require completely different skills.
Retelling demands restraint and voice.
Reimagining demands vision and structural integrity.
Choose the wrong approach, and you end up with something that satisfies no one—not traditional enough to honor the source, not bold enough to feel fresh.
Charlie Creed's The Cat's Tales: Feline Fairy Tales and Folklore demonstrates both approaches across its collection.
Some stories are loving retellings that bring fresh language to ancient tales. Others take familiar bones and build something entirely new. Both work because Creed understands what each approach demands.
Today, I'm giving you five essential rules for working with folklore, fairy tales, and mythology.
Whether you're writing a faithful retelling or a radical reimagining, these rules will help you honor the source while creating something genuinely new.
Let's dive in.
New to this series? Start with Part 1: “Why Authors Should Study Folklore: 7 Lessons from Cat's Tales” to understand why folklore matters for contemporary writers—then come back here to master the art of deciding when to honor tradition and when to burn it down.
Rule 1: Understand What You're Actually Keeping
Here's what most writers get wrong: they think they're keeping "the story."
But what does that mean?
A story isn't one thing. It's layers:
The plot (sequence of events)
The structure (how those events are arranged)
The character archetypes (roles characters play)
The power dynamics (who has agency, who doesn't)
The thematic questions (what the story explores)
The central images (the red cloak, the glass slipper, the beast)
The cultural context (the values and beliefs embedded in the tale)
The resolution (what justice looks like, what the ending means)
You cannot keep all of these layers and call it your own work. You must choose.
How to do this:
Step 1: Write down which layers of the source material genuinely interest you.
Are you fascinated by the plot mechanics? The power dynamics? A specific image? A thematic question the original raised but didn't fully explore?
Step 2: Decide how many layers you're keeping intact.
Retelling: Keep 5-7 layers, innovate on 1-3 (usually voice, setting, or perspective)
Reimagining: Keep 1-3 layers, rebuild everything else from scratch
Step 3: Be ruthless about what you're discarding.
If you're not keeping the original plot, don't let it constrain your structure. If you're not keeping the cultural context, don't half-heartedly gesture at it.
Commit to your choices.
Example from Cat's Tales:
When Creed retells "The King of the Cats," he keeps the plot, structure, character roles, and resolution intact. His innovation comes through voice and cultural specificity. He’s chosen his layers deliberately.
In your work:
Maybe you're drawn to "Beauty and the Beast" because of the central question: what does it mean to love someone whose exterior frightens you?
If that's your fascination, you can discard the plot entirely. You don't need a castle, a rose, a transformation. You just need to explore that question in whatever structure serves it best.
The result: Clarity about what you're actually doing prevents you from getting trapped between retelling and reimagining—which is where most weak adaptations live.
Rule 2: Know Why the Original Worked Before You Change It
You cannot successfully honor or subvert something you don't understand.
Before you write a single word of your retelling or reimagining, you must answer: Why has this story survived?
Not "why do I like it."
Why has it persisted across cultures and centuries? What human need does it satisfy? What narrative mechanics make it work?
Folklore survives because it's structurally sound and psychologically resonant. If you change elements without understanding their function, you break the machinery.
How to do this:
Step 1: Study the structure.
Map out the plot beats. Notice the rhythm. Identify the turning points. Understand what makes the progression feel inevitable.
Step 2: Identify the psychological satisfaction.
What need does this story satisfy? Justice? Transformation? Recognition of worth? Triumph over oppression? Explanation for inexplicable suffering?
Step 3: Understand the cultural logic.
Why would this particular culture tell this particular story this particular way? What values does it reinforce or challenge?
Step 4: Determine which elements are load-bearing.
Some elements can be changed without breaking the story. Others are structural—remove them and the whole thing collapses.
Example from folklore:
"Cinderella" works because:
The protagonist starts undervalued (we all feel undervalued)
She's recognized for her true worth (we all want to be seen)
She's elevated to her rightful place (we want cosmic justice)
The transformation is visible and concrete (satisfying narrative proof)
If you remove the recognition element, you don't have "Cinderella" anymore—you have a different story. Recognition is load-bearing.
But you can change almost everything else. The glass slipper, the ball, the fairy godmother, the prince—these are cultural specifics, not structural requirements.
In your work:
Before you decide to reimagine "Little Red Riding Hood" as a space opera, understand that the story works because:
An innocent ventures into dangerous territory
A predator deceives through disguise
The innocent recognizes danger too late
Outside intervention provides rescue (or the innocent outsmarts the predator)
That structure is what makes it "Little Red Riding Hood." Change the structure, and you're writing something else—which is fine! But you need to know you're doing it.
The result: You can innovate boldly because you understand what you're changing and why. Your risks are calculated, not accidental.
Rule 3: Retelling Demands Voice, Reimagining Demands Vision
Here's the difference between the two approaches:
Retelling says:
"This story has power exactly as it is—I'm going to help you see it fresh."
Reimagining says:
"This story contains something worth extracting—I'm going to build something new from it."
These require fundamentally different skills.
For retelling: Your innovation is voice
You're keeping the essential structure intact, so your creative contribution comes through:
Narrative perspective (whose POV, what distance)
Prose style (your sentence rhythms, your imagery)
Setting specificity (transplanting to a different time/place)
Cultural lens (retelling through a specific tradition)
Tonal shift (making it darker, funnier, more intimate)
The plot is handled. You get to focus entirely on how you tell it.
How to do this:
Choose one clear angle for your retelling:
Shift perspective: Tell "Sleeping Beauty" from the prince's POV as he navigates the ethics of kissing an unconscious woman
Shift setting: Transplant "Hansel and Gretel" to Depression-era America
Shift tone: Retell "The Little Mermaid" as psychological horror
Shift cultural lens: Tell a Japanese folktale through Scottish tradition
Shift voice: Retell in first person present tense instead of third person past
The angle is your contribution. Choose one and commit to it.
For reimagining: Your innovation is vision
You're not constrained by the original plot, so your creative contribution comes through:
Structural experimentation (non-linear, multi-perspective, fragmented)
Thematic deepening (exploring questions the original didn't)
Power dynamic inversion (giving agency to characters who lacked it)
Genre transformation (fairy tale becomes noir thriller)
Ending transformation (different resolution that serves different themes)
The structure is negotiable. You need to know what you're building and why.
How to do this:
Ask yourself: What thematic question does the original raise that I want to explore more deeply?
Then build whatever structure best serves that exploration. You're not recreating the original—you're building something new that happens to share DNA with it.
Example from contemporary fiction:
Emma Donoghue's retellings (in Kissing the Witch) keep plot and structure largely intact. Her innovation is voice—lyrical, intimate, queer-centered perspectives that make familiar tales feel immediate and strange.
Madeline Miller's Circe is a reimagining. She extracts Circe from the Odyssey and builds an entirely new structure around the question: what's it like to be immortal, female, and powerful in a world that fears all three?
The result: You know where to focus your creative energy. Retelling? Perfect your voice. Reimagining? Build your vision.
Rule 4: Cultural Context Is Non-Negotiable
Folklore is never culturally neutral.
Every tale emerges from specific cultural conditions—specific fears, specific values, specific power structures, specific landscapes.
That context is part of what makes the story work.
When you work with folklore, you have three ethical options:
Option 1: Preserve the original cultural context
This works if:
You're from that culture
You've done deep research and can render it respectfully
The context is central to why the story works
How to do this: Study the cultural logic that created the story. Don't just borrow surface details—understand the belief systems, social structures, and historical conditions that shaped the tale.
Option 2: Meaningfully translate to a different cultural context
This works if:
You're building in a cultural context you know deeply
You're finding thematic parallels, not just reskinning
You're honoring the spirit while changing the specifics
How to do this: Identify what's culturally specific versus what's universal in the original. Keep the universal. Replace the specific with equivalent elements from your own culture.
Option 3: Build in a fully invented world
This works if:
You're writing fantasy/sci-fi
You're extracting themes while building new context
Your invented world has its own internal cultural logic
How to do this: Create cultural context for your invented world that has the same depth and specificity as real folklore. Don't just strip culture away—replace it with something equally rich.
What doesn't work: Cultural tourism
Taking folklore from a culture you don't understand, stripping away context, and using it as aesthetic decoration. This produces shallow work and often causes harm.
Example from Cat's Tales:
When Creed retells, he preserves cultural specificity: the landscapes, the language patterns, the belief systems. His work has texture because the cultural context is intact.
In your work:
If you're drawn to Baba Yaga stories but you're not Russian, you have options:
Research deeply enough to preserve the Russian cultural context (requires significant work)
Extract the archetype (powerful, ambiguous older woman in the woods) and build your own cultural context around it
Create a fantasy world with its own witch-in-the-woods tradition
What you can't do: Use Baba Yaga as set dressing without understanding what she means within Russian folklore.
The result: Your work has cultural integrity. It respects source material while allowing innovation.
Rule 5: The Ending Must Earn Its Differences
This is where most retellings and reimaginings fail.
They keep the beginning and middle fairly close to the source, then slap on a different ending—usually because the writer finds the original ending problematic, outdated, or unsatisfying.
But here's the truth: You can't keep 90% of the original story and change only the ending. Stories don't work that way.
Endings are where all your choices pay off. If you're changing the ending, you need to change everything that leads to it.
How to do this:
If you're retelling:
Keep the essential resolution intact. Your version might render it differently, but the thematic closure should match the original.
The prince wakes Sleeping Beauty. Cinderella is recognized. The beast transforms. These endings aren't bugs—they're features. They're why these stories survived.
If you can't live with the original ending, you're not retelling. You're reimagining.
If you're reimagining:
Your different ending must be supported by different structure throughout the story.
Want Beauty to leave the Beast? You need to build a version where she has agency, resources, and reasons to leave from the beginning.
Want the youngest sibling to fail? You need to question the logic of fairy tale justice throughout the story.
Want the witch to win? You need to build a narrative that allows for moral ambiguity or inverted values from page one.
You can't have it both ways.
Example from contemporary fiction:
Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver takes the bones of "Rumpelstiltskin" but earns its different ending by building different character agency from the start. Her protagonist makes different choices throughout, so the different resolution feels inevitable, not tacked on.
Contrast that with retellings that keep the traditional tale 90% intact, then suddenly give the protagonist modern feminist consciousness in the final chapter. It doesn't work because it wasn't built into the foundation.
In your work:
Ask yourself: If I'm changing the ending, what else needs to change to make that ending inevitable?
Then make those changes from the beginning. Build the ending you want by constructing the story that leads to it.
The result: Your ending feels earned, not imposed. Whether you honor the traditional resolution or subvert it, readers feel satisfied because the story delivered what it promised.
Putting It All Together
Working with folklore, fairy tales, and mythology requires:
Clarity about what you're keeping (choosing your layers deliberately)
Understanding why the original works (knowing the machinery before you change it)
Matching your approach to your innovation (voice for retelling, vision for reimagining)
Cultural integrity (preserving, translating, or replacing context—never stripping it)
Earning your ending (building from the foundation, not tacking on at the end)
Follow these five rules and you can honor tradition while creating something genuinely new.
Study the source material.
Choose your approach intentionally.
Execute it with commitment.
That's how you create retellings and reimaginings that last.
Making intentional choices about your author website?
Just like retelling versus reimagining requires understanding what you're building and why, your author website needs the same intentional approach. This free guide walks you through auditing your own site so you can see what's working, what's not, and exactly where to focus your efforts.
