Authors Electric

Writing teachers in classes and books often claim that there are only five/seven/nine/pick-a-number of unique plots and that everything else is just a variation on a theme. Take West Side Story as a rather famous example of the re-telling of Romeo and Juliet . Dissect these and we have a classic romance in boy meets girl, they fall in love, overcome obstacles and live happily ever after. Except they don’t, of course, which makes the latter one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. But the “happy ending” in both cases is the hope for the future – that the warring Montagues/Capulets and Jets/Sharks will overcome their differences. Retelling old stories is nothing new. Ever since the Bible, we’ve been reinventing different ways of saying the same thing. Even before the written word, we were sitting around campfires listening to stories that had been handed down through generations. Stories that told us who we were, where we’d come from and how to survive. The Brothers Grimm brought us ...