Two years ago, when my older daughter was in kindergarten, I hooked into her enthusiasm for Disney's Princess stories and exposed her to fairy tales from around the world.
We started out with Cinderella, one of the most ubiquitous of the classic fairy tales. Just about every culture in the world has some version of the story, and in no time at all we had read versions of the story from Cambodia, the Philippines, Appalachia, Germany, Ireland and the West Indies. In addition to learning about other cultures and building her geography skills, Evangeline started to recognize variations on certain motifs. She spotted the shoe test when it was a boot, recognized the part of the fairy godmother even when it was played by a bull or a fish, and after a while started to recognize the story even when she wasn't told.
Once she even made the connection between Danae in the myth of Perseus, and the dilemma of Rapunzel, but that's off the subject.
I actually was pretty happy to see her making these connections and enjoying the changes in the story, because that's something I've always enjoyed doing, too. I love to read different treatments of the same basic story, which is why I have versions of the King Arthur legend from Geoffrey of Monmouth and The Mabinogion, up through Mallory, Tennyson, T.H. White, John Steinbeck and beyond. No matter how many things the stories have in common, it's never really the same story. Tennyson brings the story nobility, elegance and divinity; White brings Arthur humanity; and Steinbeck, socialism. Usually Arthur is a hero; sometimes he's a villain. (One church in Europe has a frieze of Arthur riding a goat in hell.)
I love the way stories change and mutate and stay the same over time and across cultures, and not just stories, but words, languages and ideas as well. And one of the things I love about the Internet is finding the ways stories and ideas get passed around and rewritten at lightning speed.
Often the things that change are glurge, sentimental claptrap that's high on warm fuzzies but low on intelligence and sensibility. I've written my share of parodies of these things, but I've also come across some that have been rewritten and actually improved in terms of storytelling -- the drama has been heightened, the moral is driven home better, and the writing is tighter and cleaner.
But it's not just stories that get passed around. I've seen a few of my essays get reposted elsewhere -- sometimes by someone else taking credit for them -- and I'm sure some of the essays that get passed around also undergo revisions and changes. It happens to urban legends on the Internet all the time, it probably happens to more serious pieces of writing too.
I can't help it. I'm wondering what sort of game it would be to take something off someone's blog, and rewrite it -- not just edit, but rewrite it, to make the thoughts and entire entry one's own possession in concept -- and then pass it on to another writer, and then another, and another, for five or six people, like an advanced form of the telephone game.
I already recycle my own writing some times, when I need to revisit a theme, when I'm not satisfied with something I've written previously, or when reading it inspires a new line of thought.
What would it be like to do that deliberately with someone else's?
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