In Praise of Retelling (& Benjamin Franklin)

On Thursdays this year, I’m teaching grammar, sentence diagramming, and writing to a group of 9-11 year olds. It’s a new class prep for me, and has required more time than I expected. Particularly the grammar! (The 12 tenses, 4 types, and 4 attributes of a verb –does English even have 12 tenses?? Grammar is my downfall…) However, that is more than compensated by my favorite part of the day, the writing portion. They use a curriculum I was only cursorily acquainted with before, and I have been thrilled to find that all of Unit 3 is on narrative retelling! 

As an author of Jane Austen-inspired fiction, and other retellings like The Rise and Fall of Jane (Jane Eyre), I love this unit. You can imagine how eager I was to get here!

Now, it’s not all sunshine and roses. The writing curriculum goes along with the history cycle, which is ancient history for this year. Unfortunately, that means I won’t be introducing Austen or other great British authors at the moment. (They’re probably too young anyway. <sigh>) 

The projects we do have are excellent though. For example, this month we are retelling The Sword of Damocles and the Trojan Horse, and that’s definitely more exciting for the kids. Together we read a source text and make a key word outline about the narrative and then (after waiting a day or two) they rewrite the story using our outline (or theirs if they decided to do their own). They’re allowed to get creative with this.

Loving retellings myself, I have emphasized the ‘getting creative’ part! It’s been fun to see the students add details of setting, dialogue, and character and get a little thrill out of their own turns of phrase or changes. It’s definitely far less painful for the students than a one-line prompt, such as “Tell about the ancient Greeks,” or even worse, “Tell a story about surprising someone.” That’s just so open-ended! It seems like most kids (except for a couple girls in each class) will shut down after a sentence or two if they don’t know how to make an outline.

In the same way that retelling a story helps fill a blank page in a satisfying way, I think that reading a retelling is similarly satisfying. Instead of starting with a blank page in our imagination, we start with a template of sorts–we know who Mr. Darcy and Lizzy are, or Mr. Knightley and Emma, or regency London. Our knowledge gives us a head start.

Some of the inspiration for this curriculum comes from Benjamin Franklin. He wrote in his autobiography, “With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try’d to compleat [sic] the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand…. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method of the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer…”

Now, no Jaff author that I know is trying to improve Jane Austen, but perhaps in our sincere devotion, we shall become “tolerable English writers…!”

In passing, I found out that some people speculate that Jane Austen admired Franklin’s writing, and might have been inspired by his Silence Dogood letters to write her first small publication, a letter from “Sophia Sentiment.”

Anyway, I took some of my books into class last week to show the students that retellings can actually be widely popular. Most of the kids have read fairy tale retellings of one sort or another, as well as Percy Jackson (Greek mythology), and more. Maybe someday they’ll write their own, or if you have been waiting to put your own spin on a story, I hope you’ll do it!

Cheers,

Corrie Garrett