The Famous Four go Wild

It’s ten days until the writing group meeting and I’m beginning to think about what I might write for it. Our challenge this time is to rewrite a story, to interpret something well-known such as a fairy tale, legend or children’s story for example. I’m quite excited by this – not just for me writing something, but to hear what the others have written. They are all such clever writers, they are bound to present their tale in an unexpected and very original way.

When I was teaching students (as school pupils are now called) in a PRU (pupil referral unit) I produced a lot of material which I wrote specifically for them. I wrote three short novels,  one about a girl who witnessed her English teacher being shot by baddies (he survived thanks to her) one  about a boy who was on the run from mysterious villains who had trashed the caravan where he lived, and the third was ‘The Story of Rufus Redmayne’. This last one was a modern version of Little Red Riding Hood – Rufus’s grandma is an independent granny and lives alone in Camel Wood, the imaginary forest which appears in many of my stories. Rufus  sets off on his bike to visit her, but she’s vanished, leaving her door gaping open.  As a modern version, the media descends on the area looking for the missing gran, and also interviewing farmers who have had their beasts killed by some huge wild creature. There are other fairy stories and legends brought into the tale before Rufus and a girl from his school (somewhat similar to Goldilocks) and a forest ranger (a take on Robin Hood/Jack in the Green etc.) rescue granny from a werewolf.

It would be very tempting to rewrite my Rufus story, but of course I won’t – that would be no challenge at all, so I must think of something else! Maybe something in the style of Enid Blyton – thinking about the adventures my writing chums and I have, ‘The Famous Four go Wild Near Glastonbury’ perhaps! My featured image shows how wild we were!