Lockdown Storytelling

Want to tell a story but you’re running out of ideas? Why not take a traditional tale and tell it or write it in your way? We love doing this.

Our story Tom, Dad and Colin is based on an old fable, The Man, the Boy and the Donkey. We wrote it for a reading scheme at a level where the words boy and donkey were too hard. So we gave them easier names to read. Tony Ross’s illustrations made it a very funny book.Sometimes we do more than just change the names. We’ve written two stories about Cinderella.

In Cindy and the Football Boots, our Cinderella is an amazing football player with two horrible stepbrothers who want to stop her getting to the match.

In Cinderella:The Real Story Cinderella is the villain and her ugly stepsisters are the heroes. We even managed to bring in The Big Bad Wolf and Rumpelstiltskin. The story is told in texts, emails, social media and police reports.

We’d never been happy with the original ending of The Princess and the Pea. The poor princess has a bad night’s sleep and then has to marry a prince she’s only just met. In The Proper Princess Test we changed the ending to make our princess much feistier and in charge of her own destiny.

These are just some ideas. Have a go yourself. How about the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk? You could make Jack the villain and the giant a vegetarian. You could set it at your school where the beans have been sown as a school project. There’s lots of stories out there waiting for your special touch.