How I Retold Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid"

Since my third Once Upon a Time Today novella, The Tree Hugger, will be releasing on August 26th, I'm writing a short series on how I've retold each tale. Dreaming of the Sea is the second tale in the collection. It will be free on Amazon August 23rd through the 25th, so pick up a copy if you don't already have one!

When I read the original version of the “The Little Mermaid”, I was surprised with its spiritual emphasis. None of the movie remakes or retellings I’d read conveyed the original tale’s underlying theme: Mermaids don’t have souls and the little mermaid wanted one. Rather profound. But it left me with a dilemma. I have two goals for each Once Upon a Time Today novella. The first is to update the story with characters and setting, the second is to remain true to the original fairy tale’s essence while providing some kind of twist.

I realized if I remained true to the essence of “The Little Mermaid”, I’d be grappling with spiritual themes. I chose to go ahead and twist the original tale by having a mortal at risk of losing her immortal soul.

Although the sea witch is a critical figure in the original tale, she doesn’t get a lot of stage time. I’d read Wicked years ago and loved the spin on the Wicked Witch of the West, so I decided to focus my retelling on “the witch” as well. One fun detail: We see the “original” little mermaid come to the sea witch’s lair and have quite an impact on the sea witch’s apprentice in Dreaming of the Sea.

When it came to setting, I decided to make use of the convent that served as an important place in the original tale. Out of that decision, Miriam was born. Miriam seems to be almost everyone’s favorite character. Determined, but also dreamy, her journey in the story is quite spectacular.

How I Retold Han's Christian Andersen's "Beautiful"

Since the third tale in my Once Upon a Time Today collection, The Tree Hugger, will be releasing on August 26th, I thought I'd do a series on how I retold each tale. I'll begin with Beautiful Beautiful the first tale in the collection, which is will be free on Amazon August 20th through 23rd, so pick up a copy if you don't already have one!

I chose Han's Christian Andersen's "Beautiful" for the first retelling in my collection because beauty is something that has always moved and fascinated me, it's one of my obsessions. I do believe that whether one wishes to acknowledge it or not, beauty has a lot of power. However, the question of what is beautiful, is very personal. And though our perceptions of beauty are influenced by our families and culture, we all ultimately perceive the beautiful distinctly.

You see, I could go on and on...

In Andersen's tale, a male sculptor is besotted with a beautiful but quiet young lady. He misinterprets her reticence as depth and proceeds to marry her. As he lives with her, he discovers his wife's lack of speech isn't so much that "still waters run deep", more that she's rather passive and insipid. His awareness of her nature comes too late. It doesn't help that the young lady's overbearing mother moves in with the newlyweds.

I won't go into the rest of the tale here [SPOILER ALERT], but suffice it to say that by the end of the tale, the sculptor's eye for beauty has altered and matured.

To make this tale contemporary, I chose a female protagonist, Kerrin Mayham. She needed to be driven by beauty, so a film director seemed like the perfect profession. I wanted to remain true to the protagonist misjudging the interior of someone who was physically beautiful. Enter aspiring actor Anthony Zorr.

While he doesn't have an overbearing mother, he does have an aggressive agent in Marni Lamb. The story unfolds from there.

I added the narrative frame after the core story was written because I wanted to add another layer of enchantment to the tale. Allowing Kerrin to create a fairy tale by drawing from the experiences in her life, allowed me to recreate one of the special memories I shared with my own mother who seemed to spin the most fantastical tales out of nothing when I was child. But who knows? Perhaps she was drawing from the well of her experience too.

The Girl Who Believed in Fairy Tales

Loosely biographical, The Girl Who Believed in Fairy Tales is free! The three short stories chronicle the journey of a young girl spiritually sustained by fairy tales as she transforms into a woman who finds her place in the world by—what else?—writing fairy tales.

The Girl Who Believed in Fairy Tales on Pinterest