Ever since Pride and Prejudice and Zombies mashed up zombies and famous literature, the remix has become a tenacious literary trend. Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu was Ben H. Winters, the author of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and the upcoming Android Karenina (pictured).
He spoke about “Horatio Alger Versus The Doppelganger,” his submission for our World’s Longest Literary Remix contest, where 150 pre-registered GalleyCat Reviews readers are re-writing a single page of a Horatio Alger novel for fun and prizes. Winters also shared advice for writers trying to break into the booming field of literary mashups.
Press play below to listen.
Winters offered this advice for all aspiring mash-up writers: “You have to read the original text a bunch of times. That’s the first step, to get the original in your bones and to carry it around with you for a little while. See what kinds of outside elements feel most appropriate for this particular situation.”
He continued: “Alger is one of those authors–he has his place in the canon. He did what he did very well. But once you get down to the nitty-gritty, sentence by sentence, it can be pretty tough going… It was really fun. I got a page where the hero Joe is facing off against this mysterious highwayman–basically an old-school mugger.”
He concluded: “With this one page of Alger, I said ‘How can I turn this tiny confrontation between our protagonist and this mysterious character into something new?’ What I arrived at was that the mysterious character turned out to be a clone, or a dop of our hero. He has a weird confrontation with his shadow self–which is bizarre, and really makes no sense in the context of the novel as a whole but felt kind of appropriate for this particular moment.”
Full Disclosure: Quirk Books has contributed a prize package for our remix contest.