Blogger: Janet Kobobel Grant
Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.
In the Herbie Hancock interview on the PBS News Hour that I referred to yesterday, I learned that Hancock won a Grammy Award in 2009 for reconfiguring Joni Mitchell songs into jazz pieces. He talked about how being inventive often is taking what already exists and finding new expressions.
As you look at what’s being published nowadays, where do you see inventiveness, taking something old and making it something new? Ways of reconfiguring how we think about an idea or writing style and doing something new with it?
Here are a few that occurred to me:
- Reconstructed fairy tales. Taking a fairy tale and wrapping it in contemporary clothing.
- Mashups like Jane Austen and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.
- Books that imagine what happened in some dark corner of a well-known historical moment or a famous person’s life. The novel March by Geraldine Brooks explores what was happening to the father of the Little Women while he was off to war. It won a Pulitzer Prize.
What other books can you think of that borrowed something old and made something new out of it?
I’ve enjoyed Brock and Bodie Thoene’s AD Chronicles. Many showcase familiar gospel stories from the perspective of someone who was there but unnamed. For example, what would it have been like to be “the man born blind”? What was his life like before he met Jesus? After? How did he come to be in the crowd?
Enlightening to think about!
The theme this week is so much fun. Thanks Janet.
I thought Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was one of the most inventive movies I’ve seen…I suppose particularly since I’m a Shakespeare afficionado. The idea of taking a minor character from a major play (this time Hamlet) and seeing the same story from these minor characters’ eyes was brilliant and entertaining.
On the subject of jazz and classical, I always write with one of those playing in the background hoping the composers’ musical genius will somehow seep into my writing. We don’t need to neccessarily weave those into our writing in a literal sense, but they can have an inspirational effect on what we do, putting jazz and classical melodies into the rhythm of our prose.
Michael, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a perfect example of taking a well-known work and imagining the story from two minor characters’ POVs. A very creative idea.
And we have a client who is contracted to write a book on the lover Shakespeare wrote his poems to. What a great riff on Shakespeare.
I love a book that tells the untold story– like Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargossa Sea. Rhys gives the story of the mad woman locked in the attic in Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
Or Grendel by John Gardner which retells the Beowulf legend from the monster’s point of view.