Making the old new again

You hear it all the time in publishing: "we want fresh takes on what's familiar." What does that mean exactly? Readers want to be delightedly surprised, not left scratching their heads. In traditional publishing at least, there seems to be a pretty good formula for accomplishing this--take a standard plot and add a twist.

Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces gave us the monomyth--the hero's journey structure found is pretty much every adventure story from The Odyssey to Star Wars t...