Retell Me a Story Guest Post: Marissa Meyer

I'm super excited to welcome my next guest poster, Marissa Meyer.  She's the author of Cinder and the forthcoming Scarlet, both part of The Lunar Chronicles series and both imaginative retellings of fairy tales.  She can also be found on twitter and Facebook.  Thanks for being here, Marissa!

CINDER: On Writing a Fairy Tale Scavenger Hunt

When I decided to write a series of futuristic fairy tale retellings, I was determined to write a series of books that were entirely unique, despite their fairy tale ties. After all, these stories (and Cinderella in particular) have been told and retold a million different times in a million different ways, and while I adore many retellings and rags-to-riches tales, I didn't want my book to become "just another Cinderella story."

So it became a challenge to figure out where the boundaries of the Cinderella story were, and how far I could bend and twist them, while still maintaining that air of familiarity that I love about retellings. I wanted readers to have the sense that this was still the fairy tale from their childhood, just not quite how they'd read it before.

I began by re-reading the most well-known versions of the tale - Grimm and Perrault - and also revisiting some popular retellings, such as ELLA ENCHANTED by Gail Carson Levine. From that, I began to pick out the elements that, to me, make up the most iconic moments of the Cinderella story:

- Cinderella as a lowly servant or in a low social class
- The Prince
- The Wicked Stepmother
- The Ball and the means by which Cinderella gets to it (help from a fairy godmother or kindly spirit, the pumpkin carriage)
- The Slipper

Once I knew which elements seemed necessary to me to keep that Cinderella feel, I was able to let the story grow and expand, through new plot twists, unexpected characters, and futuristic world-building. Soon I had a heroine who was part-machine, a plague ravishing Earth, and a society of cruel mind-controlling semi-humans from the moon who were plotting war against Earth, and I went with it, so long as I still maintained the framework of those original elements.

I also had a lot of fun taking those elements and working them into the context of my futuristic world. Cinder's low social standing is a direct result of her cybernetic make-up. The ball is an annual event that celebrates 126 years of world peace following the Fourth World War. The slipper is represented by (what else?) a too-small cyborg foot.

I've had readers describe CINDER like a scavenger hunt, in which they would forget they were reading a retelling at all until they stumbled across one of these iconic elements that harked back to its fairy-tale roots. I love this analogy, because it perfectly captures what I was aiming for when I wrote it. I'm attempting to keep that same combination of new-meets-familiar throughout The Lunar Chronicles, which will also be retelling Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Snow White. I hope the sensation of a fairy-tale scavenger hunt continues, and that readers have as much fun hunting down these iconic elements - some more subtle than others - as I've had writing them in.

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