Reimagining the Classics: What Modern Retellings Can Teach Us

I’ve always been an unabashed lover of novels, and an equally unabashed consumer of movie and miniseries adaptations. Some I adore (Colin Firth’s Pride and Prejudice supremacy forever), and some I’ll politely pretend never happened (looking at you, 2005). But what fascinates me most isn’t the faithful adaptations we debate endlessly; it’s the ones we never realized were adaptations at all.

There’s something delightful about discovering that a film you grew up quoting wasn’t just a clever screenplay, but a classic story in disguise. A story reshaped, modernized, re-dressed in contemporary anxieties and aesthetics… yet still unmistakably rooted in the original.

That little shock of recognition—Oh, wait… that’s Emma? That’s Shakespeare? That’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses?—is exactly what inspired this week’s prompt.

Inspiration Prompt: I Watched the Movie, Does That Count?

What do Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Cruel Intentions have in common? At first glance, it doesn’t feel like they really should have anything. One’s a pastel-drenched comedy about a Beverly Hills fashionista. One’s a high school rom-com with Heath Ledger at his most swoon-worthy. And one is… well, deliciously scandalous in a very 1990s way. And yet, these three iconic films are all modern retellings of classic literature—and the casual viewer probably had absolutely no idea.

Clueless translates Jane Austen’s Emma into the sunlit world of 1990s Los Angeles, where a pure-hearted but totally oblivious valley girl slowly grows into herself and, eventually, love. 10 Things I Hate About You lifts its entire plot from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew—trading Elizabethan suitors and arranged marriages for high school hallways and a brooding Patrick Verona. And Cruel Intentions? It’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses relocated from French aristocracy to Manhattan prep school culture, where manipulation and status games are just as ruthless, if slightly less corseted.

Were you already aware these were adaptations? Does knowing that change how you see them or how you feel about the originals?

Why Creatives Love to Hate Adaptations (And Why That’s Worth Examining)

Book lovers have a complicated relationship with adaptations. We wince when a beloved character is miscast. We mourn the subplots that got cut. We whisper the book was better like a protective spell.

But here’s the thing: the fact that these films worked—that they became cultural touchstones in their own right—says something important. The stories endured because the core truths endured. Social climbing, manipulation, the girl who doesn’t realize her own blind spots… these aren’t 18th century problems. They’re human problems.

And that’s exactly where writers and creatives can find a goldmine of inspiration.

Using the Classics as a Creative Springboard

When you’re stuck staring at a blank page, overthinking your own ideas, circling the same stories, sometimes the best move is to borrow a very old skeleton and dress it in something entirely new.

The classics were written for their moment. Your job, if you choose to accept it, is to ask: what does this story look like in mine?

Here are three ways to get started:

Tip 1: Find the Universal Wound

Every great classic is built around a universal human experience — jealousy, ambition, forbidden love, the hunger for power. Before you start modernizing, strip the story down to that single wound. In Emma, it’s the blindness of someone so confident in her own perception that she nearly misses what’s right in front of her. In Les Liaisons Dangereuses, it’s the emptiness underneath cruelty.

Once you identify the wound, you can transplant it almost anywhere — a group chat, a workplace, a family dinner. Ask yourself: where does this wound show up in the world right now?

Tip 2: Let the Setting Do the Heavy Lifting

One of the smartest things Clueless did was use Beverly Hills as a direct analog for Austen’s class-obsessed English village. The setting wasn’t just window dressing — it carried the commentary. Status, manners, who belongs and who doesn’t: Beverly Hills in 1995 had all of it.

When you reimagine a classic scene or story, choose a setting that has its own built-in social rules and tensions. A reality TV competition. A tight-knit online fandom community. A small town facing a big corporation. Let the world you build carry some of the thematic weight so your writing doesn’t have to work so hard.

Tip 3: Collage Your Way In (You Don’t Have to Write a Novel)

Modern retellings don’t have to be full stories. Some of the most interesting creative work happens in the margins: a single scene, a character study, a poem, a visual collage. If writing intimidates you, try a different entry point:

• Collage: Pull imagery from magazines or print outs that represent your chosen classic, then layer in images from the modern world. Let the juxtaposition tell the story visually.
• A single scene rewrite: Pick your favorite (or most hated) scene and rewrite it in today’s vernacular. What does Ophelia text Hamlet? What does Emma’s group chat look like?
• A persona poem: Write in the voice of a classic character dropped into 2026. What are they confused by? What feels eerily familiar?

Small creative experiments are often where the biggest breakthroughs live.

Your Challenge This Week

Pick a classic—a novel, a play, even a fairy tale—and create a modern version. It can be a collage, a poem, a short story, or a single reimagined scene set in the contemporary world. The goal isn’t to improve on the original. It’s to find out what it still has to say.

Share what you make with us. We’d love to see which classics are living rent-free in your head and what happens when you let them out.

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