The Rewriter's Fallacy

Anyone who ever wrote something will have this idea at least once:

"Wouldn't it be totally cool if I rewrote a classic... like something by Shakespeare or Jane Austen... only this time the story will be mine. Using all these well-known characters from the classics will make my story so much better... and it'll be so easy to write!"

I'd like to name it

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The Rewriter's Fallacy:
The notion that you can cut out a bunch of character names, a bit of plot, and a bit of setting from another author's work -- then paste them into your own story -- and the pilfered characters/plot/settings will automatically give your work a quality and depth that it wouldn't have had without them.
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I politely disagree. It's what you put into your work that determines its quality. Your actual work. Not the bits that you borrow from others.

I'm not saying you shouldn't offend readers who cherish the original work... if its copyright has expired, go for it.
I'm not saying you can't borrow a bit here and there... there is such a thing as inspiration.
I'm not saying you can't mock the classics... nothing succeeds like good mockery.
But: you can't expect the borrowed bits to do the hard work for you. You can't "coast" on the strength of the source material without falling flat.


A simple litmus test would be: Can the story you write stand on its own even if you removed the borrowed bits?

But let's be charitable. That a writer tries to "rewrite a classic" doesn't have to mean he or she isn't "trying."
When Alice Randall wrote The Wind Done Gone, she was also making a strong point about how Gone With the Wind had whitewashed Southern history and made the slaves invisible. I wouldn't call that devious or dishonest.
If Randall has an "agenda" with re-interpreting a "classic"(well, sort of a classic), then that is an agenda I can get behind -- especially since the original was so dishonest in the first place.

However... in this example of "rewriting a classic," the author tries to use Shakespeare to carry his well-known agenda, and many have objected to it.

Scott Lynch is charitable (and witty) toward said author:
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I'm pretty much an inclusive absolutist when it comes to re-interpreting Shakespeare. Add, sift, transmute, refine, pervert, and bowdlerize if you will... throw in steampunk robots, change settings, swap character genders, add harsh language, remove sex, add sex, whatever. 
Shakespeare's work isn't some solemn mausoleum at which we all must pay cold-blooded obedience, it's a playground which we can and must dig up, dirty, and refurbish on a continual basis.

So Card's got every right to tinker with Hamlet to his sad little heart's content. What draws my fierce mockery is that his Hamlet's Father willfully ignores the character and content of the original. 
The assertion that it reveals "what's really going on" in the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark is a reeking lie. It isn't an elegant interface with Shakespeare's creation, but a complete re-invention of it, steam-cleaned of its original texture and meaning. OSC's sternly moralizing, dull-as-a-brick Hamlet can only be conjured by completely disregarding everything the original character said, thought, and did. 
Now, if that's what you want to write, go ahead and write it. Just have the honesty to call it what it is... a bloody rewrite. Not an honest engagement with the original text.
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What next for Orson Scott Card? Could a radical re-interpretation of Twelfth Night be far behind...?