How to Turn a Fairy Tale into a Picture Book
The Making of The Three Billy Goats Gruff
Today, Jon and Mac answer a question from the reader mailbag about their adaptation of The Three Billy Goats Gruff. You can submit a question of your own to lookingatpicturebooks@gmail.com (or leave it in the comments of this post).
There’s a lot of discussion of fairy tales in this post. For further reading, Jon and Mac recently recommended some fairy tale picture books.
The Looking at Picture Books Shop is selling tote bags and posters.
MAC: Hi Jon.
JON: Hi Mac.
MAC: Today's question is from Sunny H.:
Hi, Mac & Jon, I was so happy to know that we readers could have a conversation with you at Looking at Picture Books. I have a small question (but maybe big thinking) about retelling fairy tales. What issues do you think about when adapting a fairy tale？ For example, we know that you guys re-made a famous fairy tales book called Three Billy Goats Gruff. *You can reference my name if you need it. Thank you so much for your time! Best, Sunny H.
First of all, initially I thought Sunny H. was saying that our version of The Three Billy Goats Gruff was a "famous fairy tales book," and I was like, thank you, Sunny H.
JON: It's a relative term! It's famous in like... relation to other books about goats.
MAC: The first thing I thought a lot about when sitting down to write this story was the question of how "faithful" to be to the "original" story.
This book is the first in a series of fairy tale picture books I wrote (none of the other ones are out yet and none of the other ones are illustrated by Jon, just to be clear.)
JON: (You can either assume I was too good to do more than one or that I got fired. Take your pick.)
MAC: When I was first talking to my editor at Scholastic, Liza Baker, about these books, I wanted to make sure that the publisher wasn't expecting fractured fairy tales.
I love fractured fairy tales. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales is the book that made me want to write for children. But probably because of that, I wasn't really interested in trying to do, like, a comic subversion of The Three Billy Goats Gruff, which I was afraid would be what a lot of people would expect from me, a fear that was later confirmed when everyone referred to our book as a fractured fairy tale.
But I don't think it is!
JON: It isn't! What, Mac, would you say, makes a fairy tale fractured?