For centuries, fairytales and folklore have served audiences of all ages as sources of inspiration and grim moral lessons. Writers in recent years have taken some of these stories and re-imagined them, or even turned them completely on their heads in order to bring their timelessness into our modern age. Books like Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted are two examples that might immediately come to mind.
Think of a classic fairytale (your favorite, perhaps), and either expand upon it, bring it into a modern or futuristic world, or retell it from another character’s point of view. How would the story of Beauty and the Beast change if told from the sorceress’s point of view? How could Red Riding Hood’s story be relevant today? Just why would Cinderella’s glass slipper fit only her?