If you want an easy way to change up a retelling, to give it a new spin, try doing a character roll reversal or a character roll swap where you were taking things from the originals and you were going to tweak them but, and like shift them around to add a new perspective. A great example of this is My Little Mermaid retelling the sinking. Now, we know in the original Little Mermaid, it’s about a mermaid who wants to go to land and get legs and find a man and do all the things. And she signs away her voice so that she can go to land and win the heart of the Prince and live happily ever after up on land. Unless you’re in the original. And then she turns to film.
But it’s not so nice. In my book, I’ve done a lot of role reversals. Instead of a mermaid, I have taken a human girl. And she wears a necklace that was kind of enchanted and she gets pulled out into the ocean. And when she does, her legs transform into a tail. So now I have a human girl in a tale fighting to get back to the world. She meets a mer man. So our prince, instead of being a human princess, now a mer prince. And he is going to help her on her journey. He’s going to take her to the Merqueen. So no longer do we have a big, tough dad, Merman, who is in charge of his mermaid daughter, but we’ve got a mer queen who is in charge of her mer prince son and is going to help the human girl get her legs back. So we do roll reversal. We take the things that are there and we switch them. And you can do things like gender swapping, you can do things like roll reversal. There’s a lot of things you can tweak in order to add a new perspective to the story. So let’s say you are going to be doing some other type of retelling, how can you roll reversal those things? Cinderella, maybe Cinderella is not a girl going to a ball, but a princess who’s trapped at a ball who then kind of goes in disguise or maybe the boy goes in disguise. You can do all of those different things. You can change those different perspectives. Now it is a little bit different than a gender swap. So in that example I just gave you, our leading person is now the princess. She’s not going to the palace. She’s already in the palace. Our Cinderella is the boy, but we’re not following his story. So there’s, there’s versions, there’s iterations of this that you can do.
But what you’re looking for specifically is those role reversals. So what are the known storylines in Goldilocks, in Cinderella, in Sleeping Beauty? What are the known storylines now? How can we roll reversal? Those things. I actually do this really funnily in an upcoming book. I can’t tell you too much about. It is, it’s a Sleeping Beauty retelling. But I changed her role. I changed the way that she is doing things and gave her a different job within the story that we see in other places. I can’t tell you about it. Oh, so good. When it comes out, I’ll link it down below. But it’s a really fun way of role reversing the story. So what can you do? How can you role reverse it? And it doesn’t have to be every character. It doesn’t have to be everything. It doesn’t even have to be the main character. But look around at the different characters you have and how can you role reversal those things, the prince versus the princess, right? The villain versus the hero, the different entities, the parent versus the child. How can you reverse those rules so that different people are playing those different important roles?
We still have the same themes and tropes and patterns and, you know, things they’re going to be doing inside of these stories, but you’re full reversing them. You’re kind of UNO reversing that. How can you do that? Start thinking about that and then think about how you can implement that into your story. Like I said, if you need an example of the sinking is a great one. It’s about that human girl getting trapped in the ocean and fight to get her legs back. They’ll see which wants to silence her, but not for the reasons you think.
Rehearsals everywhere inside of the story. So the, if this is a novella, so it’s a short story and very easy and very simple for you to go through to get a good idea of how you can swap those things in your own story to level up your retail hellings and add a new perspective to them.
And as always, you can follow along with all of my books because I am continuing to put out retailings. I don’t just do retailings, but I do a lot of retailings. I love it. And I have a lot of, or I guess I’m coming into the era where I’m starting to release the things I have previously written with her, different iterations of the same story. So to sleep in beauties, to little mermaids, all of those things. So you can see how you can put different perspectives on it, no matter what you’re writing or how you’re writing up. There’s also a ton of episodes in our playlist and in other playlists here on the channel where I am teaching you how to do retailings and how to put on those appropriate spins and twists so that you can love, follow up what you’re doing, so that you can make your life really easy and write really creative retellings without having to stress about them. So drop your questions on my telling is down below.
Grab a copy of the syncing if you wanna check it out, as well as several of my other books, which some of the other books are free, by the way, on all major platforms in the ebook format. You should check them out if you haven’t. And we’ll see you in the upcoming episodes as they continue to help you navigate the world of publishing, from your writing to your publishing to marketing to make this your best author life ever with the most profit possible with the latest amount of stress and overwhelm. We’ll see then.