The Art of Retelling a Story: Fill Every Vase With Roses

I fell in love with Henry James at a Ben Franklin store in Flint, Michigan, when I was 11 or 12; who can now recall? Hidden between the Mars bars and mentholated cough drops, the goldfish swimming in a glass bowl, a cat asleep at the window, the bottles of green apple shampoo, lipstick, and kits to make model airplanes, there was a rack of paperback novels—classics of suspense, terror, romance, and science fiction: four books for two dollars or 95 cents each.

(5 Retellings Worth the Read.)

Those thrilling paperbacks were a world away from the long-ago Morocco-bound tomes in gilded age libraries, but I earned a dollar an hour babysitting, so they were perfect for me. What a small but agonizing drama it was to choose a story to read on a summer day—. Would it be The Time Machine or Jane Eyre? Frankenstein? Or—Washington Square?

One way or another you should work for your art, and sure, perhaps suffer a little too.

Washington Square had a picture of an old dark house on the cover.

The book—and its author, a gloomy ghost in a top hat and cape——came home with me.

And so I read Henry James. I read on the front steps of my house as cars drove by. I read in the backyard under the crabapple tree—. Like any other reader, I dreamed and I wandered. And I wondered, if this story were mine, how would I tell it?

Are there responsibilities that begin in dreams?

Many years later, I wrote a novel and called it Morocco. It is an ode to mystery and to memory and to twice-told tales. It is very much a retelling of Washington Square, and why not? If you love a book—why not become the very ghost who haunts its halls?

Is there a difference between a writer’s responsibility and the dream of a reader?

Imagine this: You fall into a dreamworld when you read a novel. You live for a time in the turning of the page. And after the last page, you keep the story going—you move furniture, fill every vase with roses—. A reader can exist in a story this way, but what about a writer?

Does a writer have the right to live in someone else’s dream—to haunt their house, to sleep in their bed—to borrow their typewriter and begin?            

Can you—or should you—take the plot of your favorite novel, and with your scissors cut the characters from the page and paste them onto another background? Will you pack their suitcases and purchase train tickets and send the characters to a strange time and place?

My answer is yes.

Or maybe it is no.

How a book comes to a writer is somewhere between love and theft.

There is an argument to be made for the idea that no story exists without the stories that have come before it, but who wants to hear that? Not when you could read every book in the library and still want more stories.

There are books that live within books and characters who have the will to walk and talk and break your heart and take your copy of Dracula from the shelf without even asking.

Why not keep writing? Reimagining—retelling a story—so that you can read it again.

It happened, I swear, exactly the way that I said it did. Or maybe it didn’t. It is a long way from the Midwest to Morocco, but I got there with ink and glue and every ghost in the graveyard. I found Henry James, a dime-store treasure, waiting for me by the travel umbrellas and picture postcards. I fell for him. And his book fell open before me. I read—. It was only that I could not stop myself. So maybe it wasn’t a Ben Franklin store. Those paperback classics might have been hidden in a Woolworth’s or at Kresge’s, back by the lunch counter, just past the photobooth. You sat in the dark and took three pictures of yourself, like some time machine showing you the past, the future, and the present. How a book finds a reader is a kind of gift.

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