Setting the bird free - Lari Don

I wear various hats as a writer. I write for a variety of ages, and the difference in writing for toddlers and for teens might seem like the biggest difference I face. But actually, the difference between the fiction I write (for all ages) and the retellings of traditional tales I write (for picture books and 8-12 years) is the real divide. That’s what requires the real shift in focus and process and skills.

With fiction, I make it up. (Obviously!)

With retellings, I use what I've learnt about words, imagery, rhythm and narrative, to retell a story that already exists. I’m not making up a story, I’m crafting a new way to tell an old story.

But of course, sometimes I do make bits up. Sometimes I have to fill gaps. Sometimes I want to expand on the exciting bits, and cut out the family trees. And sometimes I make changes because I just can’t leave the story at the ending the traditional tale offers.

I don’t believe in the inevitability of happy endings. I don’t think children do either. If a reader was sure that every story would end in the best possible way with every character smiling and content, where would the tension be, what would draw the reader on to see what happens next? So, I don’t believe in happy endings every single time, not in my fiction, nor in my retellings of old stories.

But sometimes there are endings that just don’t satisfy me.

I can do two things about that. I can decide to not tell the story, if I feel that to change the ending would be to rip the heart from the story, or make the story something so completely different that it’s not a retelling, it’s a story inspired by, or reacting to, the original trad tale.

That’s why you will rarely find a story in one of my collections where the marriage of a pretty girl to a brave boy is considered a satisfactory resolution. And you'll NEVER find a story where a girl is given away as a prize.

But sometimes the ending just needs a tweak. Sometimes my disquiet about the ending isn’t about a main character, it’s about a minor character who just hasn’t been given a resolution to their story. And then, I don’t think it unbalances the story to change it or add to it.

For example, in my recent collection of horse stories, Horse of Fire, a boy is helped by a talking horse to capture a free wild golden bird for a demanding king. And at the end of the tale, the horse is respected, the boy is the new king, and the bird is in a cage. Happy, apparently, because it has an apple to eat. But I couldn’t tell the story like that. When I told it to kids, I couldn’t leave that free-flying bird in a tiny cage, even if it was a golden cage, even if there was a fancy apple. So I had the boy, as part of his growth as a hero, risk his own future to set the bird free.

And I realised that is one of the powers and joys of retelling a story: you can, in your vision and your world, set the story bird free.

I realise this is me imposing my modern sensibility on an ancient story. The original tellers cared about the relationship between the boy and the horse, and the relationship between the boy and the king, and the magic of the bird. I care about the bird itself as well. So I set the bird free.

Yes, the more I think about it, it probably is the animal-loving vegetarian in me. Just like the feminist in my can’t see a girl given away as a prize, the animal lover in me can’t leave a wild animal in a cage.

Because the other major change I’ve made to a story recently was in a collection of Viking saga tales called The Dragon’s Hoard. I chose to retell a story about a young man who transported a polar bear from Greenland to Denmark. The original Viking saga was all about the cleverness and luck of the trader getting the bear so far south, and it didn’t tell you what happened to the bear once he had made his owner rich and respected. So I just kept the story going a little bit longer to find out what happened to the bear too. Partly for my own satisfaction, and partly because I was fairly sure that my young readers would be more interested in the bear than in the merchant!

Setting the bird free and sending the polar bear home are not the biggest changes I’ve made when retelling stories (I always feel that so long as I respect the heart of the story I can do what I like with the rest of it) but they might be the most satisfying!

So, I wonder what bird I will set free next?

Lari Don is the award-winning author of more than 20 books for all ages, including fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales, a teen thriller and novellas for reluctant readers. 

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Tracking Down Unicorns - Lari Don

I’ve spent the last month trying to track down a unicorn. You probably won’t be surprised to discover that unicorns are hard to find!

I’m currently pulling together the background research and references for a collection of horse stories (a companion to Girls, Goddesses and Giants, and Winter’s Tales.) And I want to include a unicorn, just like I want to include a centaur, a kelpie and a hippogriff. But the unicorn is proving the hardest to track down.

I keep glimpsing the perfect unicorn story, but never actually finding it. I keep finding hints of a Ukrainian story about the unicorn refusing to go on the ark with all those other smelly animals, which is apparently why unicorns aren’t exactly common these days. I like this little fable, and I want to include my retelling of it in Wild Horses, Wings and Warriors.

But in collections of myths, legends and traditional tales, I always put information at the back of the book about where I’ve found each story, with a genuine trackable source.

sources in my collection of Scottish tales Breaking The Spell

And though I keep glimpsing the unicorn story, though I keep seeing partial hoofprints, I can’t find a source that isn’t gossip, rumour or hearsay.

Google doesn’t help. The same few lines are repeated on lots of different sites, but all the sources seem to be copying each other, like a circle without a starting point. And even proper books - old dusty books, hardback books, books in the library - lots of them mention the same story but even they don’t give an actual source.

And in a slightly unlikely twist, when I mentioned my quest to my best friend, she pulled from the back of her amazing brain a SONG about the story I am hunting for, and sang it down the phone to me. Which was fun, but not really what I was looking for…

So, how much should I care about sources and provenance? All traditional tales have been made up, by someone, some time. Does it matter where I found them? Any book I use as a source, however old, will still just be one version of the story, captured at one moment. You can’t point at a particular version of an oral story and say – that’s the original story.

Even so, I think it does matter. I like to feel that anyone reading a collection of mine can go back to the sources I used and discover more about the story, perhaps find their own way of telling it and perhaps find out more about the culture the story came from. I’m retelling these old tales, not creating them myself, and I want to give credit to the sources that inspire me.

But this particular story seems to be, like the unicorn itself, very hard to find. Elusive. Frustrating. Perhaps non-existent.

I’ve never had this trouble in any other collection, with any other story. Perhaps it’s only unicorns that are impossible to track down…

a helpful child drew me a unicorn!

So should I just shrug and think, it’s only a story, and stop worrying about it? Or should I make a virtue of the fact that finding the unicorn is uniquely impossible? (It does feel quite appropriate!) Or should I keep looking? Should I keep hunting the unicorn, with my telescope, my seven league boots, my map saying ‘here be dragons’ and my compass with the needle pointing to Once Upon a Time…

I think, for now, with the deadline for Wild Horses still more than seven leagues away, I will keep hunting for that unicorn.

Lari Don is the award-winning author of 22 books for all ages, including a teen thriller, fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers.
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Retelling Tess of the d'Urbervilles, by Maxine Linnell

If you’d asked me what I’d expect to be working on five years ago, I definitely wouldn’t have said ‘I’ll be retelling Tess of the d’Urbervilles for children.’  I might have shuddered at the very idea of compressing a book I loved so much into 6,500 words. I’d have thought of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and worse, Bowdler! 

But I’m in good company. Michael Rosen retold Romeo and Juliet, and recently Philip Pullman published his version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I knew the publishers of the Real Reads series from another connection, and sitting in their garden one day I gulped and said ‘I’d like to do one of those’ - and then wondered what I’d let myself in for. 

When I looked at the books I began to see the point, and the skilful way these little books lead readers from the shallows into deeper, perhaps more satisfying waters. Gill Tavner, who tackled Dickens, Jane Austen and more greats for Real Reads, puts it this way: 

‘I have long thought that there must be a way of making the qualities of ‘classics’ accessible to most readers, but I was unconvinced that abridging was the answer. As a mother of two young children, I have endured the pain of reading abridged fairy tales and Disney films. These often machine-gun the reader with a list of events. Rarely do they offer the reader an opportunity to develop interest in or appreciation of varied vocabulary, style or themes. Do abridged versions need to be like this? Surely there is a way to make an abridged version an enjoyable and enriching rather than simply informative reading experience? Surely this is an important distinction if we aim to nurture keen, confident readers?’

The format for Real Reads includes a list of the main characters, questions to follow up the story, a list of follow-up books, films and websites, the historical context of the book and some thoughts about what readers might find if they braved the whole thing. There are also some lovely illustrations. The books were originally intended for children aged about 8-11, but they sell well to readers of English as a Second Language, and to adults who want a way into difficult books - I’ve just ordered a copy of the Ramayana, for example, as I just can’t get into reading the whole thing. 

I was lucky - I got to choose my writer and which books I’d like to do. Tess of the d’Urbervilles was the first, and perhaps the easiest. I had to retell the story in a way which makes it come alive, and with something of Hardy’s style. My usual writing voice is about as far away from Hardy’s as you could get, so it was quite a challenge. 

But I learned a lot from the process. First, I learned to step a long way back from the story, not to immerse myself in it. What were the key themes, the journeys of the characters? What was essential? What made it live? Those are important questions to ask of any book. 

Then I realised that I couldn’t go through chapter by chapter summing them up as I went. That would end up as a list of events, not a story. I had to put the book aside and tell Tess’s story from her humble beginnings to her tragic arrest for murder. And I had to think of Hardy’s feelings about Tess. He used a sub-title for the book - ‘A Pure Woman’. He clearly didn’t think Tess is to blame for what happens to her, but blamed a society with double standards. Angel Clare, who becomes Tess’s husband, has had an affair, but he leaves Tess when she admits to the same. 

There were some tricky issues too - like the scene where Alec d’Urberville rapes Tess in the forest. How could I write that essential scene for a children’s book? Hardy isn’t explicit, but he’s clear enough. I watched all the films and TV series for some help - but the directors fudged the issue, or came down on one side or the other. Here’s how I did it:

'Alec got lost in the wood. Tess was exhausted, and he helped her to lie down on the ground and covered her with his coat, while he went off to find his bearings.

When he came back, she was asleep. Alec could just make out her face in the dark. He knelt beside her, his cheek next to hers. He could still see a tear on her face.

As her people would say, it was to be. This was the last they would see of the Tess who left home to try her fortune. 

A chasm was to divide her from that former self.'

The last sentence is direct from Hardy’s book. The scene’s very close to his own.

The Mayor of Casterbridge was the most difficult of the Hardy novels to retell - it’s so rich in plot, so much happens, that I felt I had to butcher some of the story to get it into the word count. But I learned so much about editing, about looking at a book from a long way back, and from very close up, from the work I did on Hardy’s books. I still love the originals. But I’m quite proud of what I’ve done with them.

www.maxinelinnell.com

www.realreads.com