Worlds of What If: Story Ideas & Oz

I recently wrote a story about Dorothy, ten years after Oz, where she still lives in Kansas. It involves the shoes showing up suddenly in her closet. It's barely fantastical, might be called literary.

I sent it to a speculative fiction magazine where it was rejected. The comment was that the protagnonist didn't do enough and, what about the other 15 Oz books and what they covered that people knew so well. I can live with criticism and comments on what doesn't work but I didn't find the comment about the Oz books helpful nor true to the whole genre of speculative writing.

Worlds of what-if includes looking at something and saying, what if it did this instead of this? What if Snow White had actually enslaved the dwarfs to work for her and they were brainwashed? What if the Germans had won WWII? What if magic did exist and it caused a worldwide class system? There are a thousand examples of where someone takes a pre-existing concept or event and changes it.

Fairy tales have long been in the realm of public domain and many have been rewritten and retold in varying ways. The most popular example would be anything that Disney has touched, to the extent that some people think that the Disney version is the one and only. But fairy tales have a long tradition of orginally being oral tales that were eventually written down by the Grimm brothers and others. Once they hit print, they didn't change and adapt with the times as much, but they did still change. Writers still took those ideas and played with them.

L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz was written in 1900 and published in 1901. It's been around long enough that it is now in our memories. When I decided to write the story I actually had to go read the book, because like many people, I was more familiar with the movie. I didn't read the other 13 books (not 15). Though they were popular it was that original adventure that caught so many people's imaginations.

Asking, what if this happened to Dorothy is a valid question. But perhaps I'm just an angry rejected author. Well, I have given examples of other what-ifs, but let's look at two that I just found this week. Yesterday, I was listening to CBC Radio's Wiretap http://www.cbc.ca/wiretap/index.html There were two stories: What if the Penguin and Mary Poppins met on a blind date? And what if Barney accidentally killed Dino in Bedrock? Hmm, if I was the editor that rejected my story because I didn't consider the other 13 books, then I could also say but Mary Poppins never met the Penguin. What about all those other Batman comics. Or, but Dino never died and what about all those other Flintstones cartoons?

Okay, well, those are closer to the point I'm making but not about Oz. Then I came across the following article this weekend in the Dec. 2007 issue of Wired.

Tin Man--SciFi Chanel's three-part reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, premiering Dec. 2, blends steampunk and Buffy. Heroine DG (Zooey Deschanel) battles the evil Sorceress (Kathleen Robertson) to free the oppressed residents of The O.Z. The Tin Man (Neal McDonough) is a more-dreamy-than-tinny ex-cop resistance fighter, and the Scarecrow (Alan Cumming) is a victim of grand theft brain. Cheesy? Absolutely. But it's also clever and wonderfully geeky.

Steampunk and Buffy? The Tin Man is an ex-cop? Oh my goodness! But...but.... I think my point is made that it's valid to take a character, a time, a place and ask what if? It's valid to not slavishly follow what has been written but to take some elements and fly off into the worlds of imagination. As to my story, well, I'll continue to send it out and see what the editors think.

Revisionist Poems and Stories

This came about on another list when I mentioned that I've just sold my poem "The First Taste" to Dreams & Nightmares. It will be out in the January issue and is a revisionist poem about Persephone. I was asked what I meant by revisioning.

I ran into revisioning somewhere way back, maybe first to do with the retold fairy tales, especially the ones that were in the Datlow/Windling anthologies. I've also run into it in poetry but don't remember when anymore. It could have been in the creative writing courses at UBC or in the world of speculative poetry.

I guess the basis for any revisioning poem/story is that instead of a third person or narrative tale of a hero's or god's deeds, the tale is now told in first person. It might also be in the voice of the lesser being/mortal/bad guy who traditionally would be fairly two-dimensional. Getting into the psyche of the person and how they really felt.

This is sort of what happened to SF when it evolved past the embryonic stage of BEMs and started to become more realistic; or magic realism, set in today's world with just a small twist. (Is this the bastard child of canlit and spec fic?)

Like all genre words, it's just another fancy word for categorizing what we write. :) In my revisioning poems (which really is just the tale from another point of view) I've written on Dionysus, Kore/Persephone, Athena, Leda, Psyche, Demeter, Aphrodite (though the last really doesn't fit the same way as the others).If I was at home I'd just post the poem here, as it's a closed list and I wouldn't break any rights. I've also written one story on the oracle on Pythos before it/she became the Delphic oracle.

I'm sure there are other takes on revisioning but this is pretty much how I see and understand it.