Hello Jennifer! Can you please clarify industry views on retellings vs plagiarism vs inspiration for traditional publishing novels? I’d love your expertise on how inspiration and retellings are different from flat out plagiarism. Thanks in advance!
As far as I know there's not some big holy tome somewhere inscribed with "Industry Views", so other people might have somewhat different opinions! But here's what I think / how I would use these words:
-- INSPIRATION: You saw something and it reminded you of something else / made you think about such-and-such in a new way, whatever -- and you made a brand-new story of your own based on or launching off of that spark of an idea. It's not a retelling at all -- but there might be "threads" of the original inspiration/s running through the story as themes, or something like that.
Everything you think of , every story you tell, every dream you have, ALL OF IT is inspired by SOMETHING, or an amalgam of somethings, whether you know exactly what it is or not!
So, I am picking a book completely at random and making up potential inspiration: Maybe Ann Patchett studied OUR TOWN in school, or performed in it. Years later she had a vacation to the cherry farms of Michigan and met someone there who reminded her of the lead in OUR TOWN. Then the pandemic happened, and she thought about people being isolated and wanting to connect with one another and mothers to tell the stories of their lives to their daughters-- and all of those things swirled together and were inspirations for TOM LAKE. (It's a masterpiece btw, and the audio is read by Meryl Streep -- well worth a listen!).
-- ADAPTATION or RE-IMAGINING: Taking the beats / themes of a classic story and reinventing it for a new audience; bringing a new perspective to it, putting it in a different setting, etc. Obviously if you are adapting / reimagining a story, it's also INSPIRED BY the original story -- but I would say the difference is that a story that is just "inspired by" such and such could be completely, wildly different than the original. If it's an adaptation, you are very specifically TRYING to hit the similar or same beats as the original.
Your story could be considered "in conversation" with the original book/story - - maybe it would be interesting to, for example, read both of them next to one another in a literature class. Maybe it shows things about the situation that readers of the original story didn't even think about. ETC.
It may be X-STORY from a different point of view that sheds new light on the story. For example: LONGBOURN is Pride and Prejudice from the servant's point of view. JAMES is Huckleberry Finn from the enslaved "Jim"/James' point of view. GRENDEL is Beowulf from the monster's pov. WIDE SARGASSO SEA is Jane Eyre, from the pov of Mr Rochester's "Crazy" wife. (All of these books are modern classics in their own right, and based on classic-classics!)
It may be X-STORY, but set in the modern era or in a different culture. For example: CINDER is Cinderella, but set among futuristic cyborgs. CLUELESS is a modern reimagining of EMMA set in 1990's Beverly Hills. BRIDE AND PREJUDICE is P&P but set in India as a Bollywood musical. BRIGET JONES' DIARY is P&P but set in an eclectic modern London. (And it's very different in many ways - Bridget is an only child, the focus of the story is really only on her - but it's also VERY CLEARLY meant to be P&P. Even Darcy's name is Darcy!) THE FLIES by Jean-Paul Sartre is an existential reimagining of the Electra myth.
It's fun for audiences to see tropes of stories they know well but done in a different way. (After all -- there are only so many stories in the world!)
-- RETELLING: You are doing your own version of a well-known story. This IS "inspired by" the original story, obviously. And it IS an adaptation / reimagining. It might be different -- have a different end, or a twist, or something like that. OR it might be a fairly faithful retelling of the story. Stephen King recently put out his version of HANSEL AND GRETEL with illustrations by Maurice Sendak -- now, I haven't taken a close look at that text and how different or the same it is from the "original" fairy tale, but I'm guessing it's very similar, just told in SK's own way. These stories are in the public domain, they are well-known to millions of people, this is just a New Version of the original story.
Obviously there's a lot of crossover and some shades of grey here. All retellings are inspired by/an adaptation of/a reimagining of source material. All adaptations/reimaginings are inspired by source material. But NOT all things that are "inspired by" are actually retellings or adaptations of the source material. And NOT all adaptations are straightforward "retellings." And hopefully NONE OF THEM are plagiarism!
-- PLAGIARISM: You are literally stealing somebody else's words. There's no credit given, you aren't "inspired by" a story, you are taking parts (or all of) a story and pretending it is by you, when it isn't.
Now, there might be, in a retelling or an adaptation, similar lines, or even direct quotes from an original text. But the difference is, you're obviously doing it ON PURPOSE, everyone is AWARE that this is an adaptation of XYZ, it's clearly a call-out to the original and so the Original Author is given "credit" directly or indirectly. Plus, it's transformative use / fair use and protected. (Plus, most stories that are being adapted in this way, like Shakespeare or Jane Austen or Dickens or Grimm Fairy Tales are in the public domain anyway, so there's no problem there.) That's not plagiarism.
