September Shorts: Remaking Cinderella

With Payback I thought about what Robin Hood might look like as a story if I tried updating it and setting it today. A number of exciting ideas emerged: Robin Hood might be a gang of teenagers not one person. They might fight evil corporations and corrupt companies instead of a greedy royal family. They might be urban rather than rural … and so on.

Here's an eqivalent to workshop with students or young writers. What if we tried to retell the story of Cinderella? First, we’d need to get to the heart of the story. Maybe we'd start by considering the following:

• What is it really about?
• What are its themes and ideas?
• What is the story for? What is it telling us?
• What are the things we couldn’t remove without breaking it?

Now consider this: which bits could we change to make it more interesting or relevant? Here are seven things we might experiment with:

• Swap the gender of the key characters and see what happens.
• Remove the slipper – then make a list of ten objects or ideas which could replace the slipper and make the story more interesting or unusual.
• Swap the number of characters. One ugly sister and three Cinderellas – how would that work? Explore it further.
• Give Cinderella the magic and remove the fairy godmother.
• Set it in a boarding school, on a cruise ship, in a prison or prisoner-of-war camp...
• Combine the fairy godmother and one of the ugly sisters (or brothers). How would that affect things?
• Remove royalty and replace it with some other type of power or status.

Updates and re-makes are a great way to get students working with familiar material in a new way because they remove barriers and democratise access to the story-building process. I'm a fan. I enjoy a good remake.

Not all remakes, however, are a good idea.