7 Rip-Offs Worth Reading

Writing sucks. This is the truth that haunts every author. There are wonderful moments, of course, when all the right words flow. But mostly, it is hard and awful work, and writers hate it.

But reading (or re-reading) a great work of literature -- that's pure pleasure. It reminds us of why we fell in love with stories in the first place, why we put ourselves through the hell of writing: for the immense satisfaction of having written.

Plucking a character from a familiar literary work and retelling the tale from her or his point-of-view gives a writer an excuse to be a reader – an obsessive, revisionist reader, but a reader nonetheless. That's how I came up with the idea for Juliet's Nurse, my novel in which Shakespeare's version of yenta-the-matchmaker finally takes center stage, recounting the fourteen years leading up to the five days made famous in Romeo and Juliet.

It's an approach writers have been using for years. Here's proof a little bit of plagiarizing can go a long way to creating new literary classics.

Readers discover that the green-skinned Elphaba's lifelong struggles with loneliness and evil turn her into a more sympathetic Wicked Witch of the West than millions of Wizard of Oz fans ever imagined.

Forget the Bennet sisters; the interesting action is below stairs in this Downton Abbey-izing of Pride and Prejudice, focusing on the plight – and occasional pleasures – of the household servants.

Now a literary classic in its own right, this may be the novel that once-upon-a-time ignited the entire genre of revisiting well-known works of literature. Think of it as the First Wives' Club meets Jane Eyre, but with a much less happy ending.

Meet the man behind Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. While Marmee and the girls keep the home fires burning, John March is off fighting the Civil War, and the demons of slavery, racism, and his own obstructed idealism.

Technically, Biff isn't a character from the New Testament, but when you're parodying the childhood of Jesus Christ, little details like adhering to the exact word of the Bible quickly fall by the way side.

Patroclus is an unwanted exile, Achilles is the beautiful son of a goddess and a king. They become boyhood companions and ultimately fellow fighters in the Trojan War. What's only implied in Homer's Iliad becomes clear here: Patroclus and Achilles are bound together by the sort of friendship that gives Greek love a good name.

It's not easy being married to a man obsessed by Moby Dick, but while hubby Ahab is off on what might be the worst business trip ever, Una Spenser manages to occupy herself with childbirth, flashbacks to her childhood in Kentucky and New England, her own shipboard adventure, intellectual dalliances with Transcendentalism and abolition, and ultimately settling down with some guy called Ishmael.