Storytwisting: A Guide to Remixing and Reinventing Traditional Stories | Creative Writing Resource for Authors & Teachers | Perfect for Classroom Lessons and Fiction Workshops

This book needs to be on every storyteller's shelf. No exceptions. Even if you have never thought of, and never plan to try, twisting a story in any way or shape, you need to educate yourself about this style/genre of storytelling - and to do so, you need to learn from the best.The Storycrafters are the best at what they do.This book contains everything you need to know about how to twist and fracture tales. It is a category much larger than parodies - storytwisting includes all kinds of adaptations and changes a teller can make to a tale, and the book organizes them into a comprehensive theoretical and practical guide. The chapters explore different ways to twist stories, from changing the setting through wordplay all the way to mash-ups. Each chapter contains stories for illustration of the techniques (among them such Storycrafters classics as The Three Pears and Beeping Sleauty). With every story, we get a long introduction about how it came to be, how it was twisted and crafted and ironed out. We also get lists of tips and tricks and techniques to try our own hands at doing something similar. The authors are incredibly generous in sharing their knowledge, experience, and metaphorical tool box for playing around with stories in creative ways.What I especially love and respect in the work of the Storycrafters is their attention to detail and context. They don't just twist stories for fun (although it is definitely fun), but they also pay attention to what messages the new versions send, what symbols and meanings they carry, and how they fit into the social and cultural context of storytelling. The book deals with such important topics as cultural appropriation, the ethics and history of rap, feminism and storytelling, etc. The authors are not only artists, but also serious researchers who spend a lot of time and energy on digging deep into folklore (both sources and literature), linguistics, history, psychology and sociology. They play and they work, they create and they research, they invent and they course-correct. They own their mistakes, share their triumphs, and encourage everyone to try new things.This book is not only an amazing practical guide, but also an ode to unbound creativity, and the love of stories, old and new alike.