For my retelling, I try to be faithful to the original plot but add in just enough changes to keep the story fresh. What do you think?

 

Original Story Breakdown

Story Beats:

Setup: A wizard's apprentice, too lazy to do chores by hand, enchants a broom to do his work for him

● The broom obeys the apprentice at first, fetching water and pouring it into the wizard's bath over and over again

● The broom doesn't stop working even after the bath is full, and the room is flooded

● Desperate, the apprentice cuts the broom in two with an axe

● The two pieces reform into two whole brooms and continue picking up water

● The entire tower gets flooded

Ending: The wizard returns just in time, breaks the spell, and declares to his student that he should not use magic he has not mastered

 

Setting

Geography: A wizard's tower

Time period: Unspecified, but original poem was written in 1797

 

Character Profiles:

● The Apprentice: Protagonist, eager to learn magic, yet overconfident in his own abilities

● The Wizard: Authority figure, motivates the apprentice, saves him just in time

● The Broom(s): Antagonist, extremely determined to fetch water

 

Writing Style:

Ballad in rhyming verse

Key Question: Why mustn't you do things you have no knowledge of?

 

Retelling Breakdown

Key Question: What would someone try to do to prove their magical powers can be useful?

 

Setting:

Geography: Suburbia

Time Period: Present day

Writing Style:

● Witty and somewhat sarcastic third-person omniscient narrator

● Magic realism

 

Character Profiles:

● Mina/The apprentice: Eager to prove herself, wants to earn her father's and everyone else's attention

● Mina's father/the wizard: Strict and overly demanding, disapproves of his daughter's magic usage, yet still loves her

● The Brooms: Antagonist, extremely determined to fetch water

● The neighborhood kids: Mina wants to befriend them, but her father forbids it out of fear of her powers getting exposed

 

Story Beats:

Setup: Mina Lai, a regular girl with magic powers, wants to show off her abilities to other kids, but her father stops her and makes her clean her bathroom to take her mind off the kids

● After she finishes, she wants to take a bath, but the bathtub sink doesn't work

● Too tired to fetch water manually, and wanting to prove her powers can be useful, she brings a broom to life and makes it fetch water

● The broom obeys, but Mina soon finds out that she cannot make it stop

● She cuts in into multiple pieces with an axe, but each individual piece regrows into a full broom

● The army of brooms continues filling the bathtub, alongside Mina's neighbors' tubs, and soon the entire neighborhood is flooded

● Mina's father, who turns out to have magical powers himself, breaks the spell and returns the neighborhood to normal

Ending: Mina is guilt-ridden and apologizes to everyone, but it turns out they did not react Mina and her father having magic powers. Realizing his overprotectiveness was unfounded, Mina's father decides to train her in magic