The Stories That Make Us: Finding Your Voice by Virginia Kantra
I’ve been thinking a lot about retellings. What we remember about beloved classics isn’t only the original text, but how we felt the first time we fell into the story. I will always hear Huckleberry Finn read aloud in my mother’s voice from the summer shadows. The Last Unicorn is scented with dust and Lysol from a London flat. Little Women feels like the soft wrinkles on my childhood bedspread. With the memories come emotions—the unconscious humor, the yearning, the warmth.
As readers, we turn to stories for comfort and adventure, to escape our childhood or to understand it. Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia. Or Sherwood or Mount Olympus, Hogwarts or Prince Edward Island, Middle Earth or Netherfield. There is magic in the names. The stories we love live on inside us, putting down deep roots, nourished by our imagination and experience, strengthened by repetition. They become part of us. They infuse our voices.
Reading develops our palate and our taste levels. It teaches us what is good and fresh; what is true and what is trite; what works and does not work. It helps us develop the vocabulary and cadence we will carry into our adult writing, expands our knowledge base, and shapes the way we look at the world. The more we read, the more we assimilate and digest to create our own vision and our own voice.
Inevitably, we are going to have favorite writers. Almost as inevitably, consciously or unconsciously, we are going to try to write like them. This is okay. Anne Lamott says “it is natural to take on someone else’s style…it’s a prop that you use for a while until you have to give it back. And it just might take you to the thing that is not on loan, the thing that is real and true: your own voice.” (Bird by Bird, p.195)
My new book, Meg and Jo, is inspired by the characters of the classic Little Women. My voice is nothing like Louisa May Alcott’s. My story is a modern reimagining, with the March sisters aged up to their twenties in a completely different setting from Alcott’s Concord. But at its heart, the story is true to my memories and experience of reading the original.
The first time I read Little Women—my grandmother gave my sister and me an abridged copy when I was about 10—I wanted to be Jo March, scribbling away in her attic room, burning with genius and ambition. (I wasn’t alone. Many other women writers, including Simone de Beauvoir and J.K. Rowling, had the same dream.) But with each subsequent rereading, my experience of the book changed. I read the unabridged edition in college and was struck by the sisters’ conflicts, the tug between independence and intimacy, between the desire to create and the need to make money. As a young mother with three children under the age of five, I identified with Meg, struggling with life after the wedding. Each of the March sisters comes to adulthood in her own, unique way, more or less successfully. And for most of my life, Meg and Jo, Beth and Amy have been companions on my own journey.
As authors, we make choices about the kinds of stories that interest us, the character types and subjects that we can write about honestly and with conviction.
My first story for Berkley was a contemporary retelling of Tamlane, set along the Appalachian Trail. My Children of the Sea series drew on a combination of Celtic legend, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, and the Genesis story in the King James Bible. But my focus was always on family and the ways we pull together in troubled times. On relationships. Which made the move to women’s fiction—and Little Women—a natural one for me.
Whether you are considering retelling a classic or not, revisiting the stories we loved in childhood can return us to where we came from and remind us of who we are and what we hold true.
Retellings can also bring fresh perspectives to beloved stories, as in Sonali Dev’s wonderful Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors. Reimaginings that reflect our own sensibilities, place and time make the classics diverse, unique and authentic. The more we bring of our distinct perspectives to our writing, the richer our shared human story becomes.
What stories formed you? What sparked your imagination or whispered to your heart? What experience and emotions do you bring to those favorites to make them your own?
Great stories are universal and unique, familiar and fresh. Which is why the world has room for half a dozen wonderful retellings of Pride and Prejudice…and I hope at least one more of Little Women.
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Virginia Kantra is the New York Times bestselling author of the Children of the Sea series and the Dare Island novels. She has won numerous industry awards, including the Romance Writers of America’s RITA Award and two National Readers’ Choice Awards.
The timeless classic Little Women inspired this heartwarming modern tale of four sisters from New York Times bestselling author Virginia Kantra.
The March sisters—reliable Meg, independent Jo, stylish Amy, and shy Beth—have grown up to pursue their separate dreams. When Jo followed her ambitions to New York City, she never thought her career in journalism would come crashing down, leaving her struggling to stay afloat in a gig economy as a prep cook and secret food blogger.
Meg appears to have the life she always planned—the handsome husband, the adorable toddlers, the house in a charming subdivision. But sometimes getting everything you’ve ever wanted isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
When their mother’s illness forces the sisters home to North Carolina for the holidays, they’ll rediscover what really matters.
One thing’s for sure—they’ll need the strength of family and the power of sisterhood to remake their lives and reimagine their dreams.
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
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