My dictionary is old, but it allows that a pastiche may be a work in the style of, or borrowing any element or elements of, another work. I’m very liberal about this, because I think it’s more fun that way. There are limits: if you just renamed the characters in your story after those in Hamlet, and there are no other similarities, probably not a pastiche. But if your characters behave or speak in similar ways, or if the same or analogous things tend to happen to them, or if you use recognizable language or forms, you might. But I believe you don’t need all these things at once, just enough to consistently evoke the original. Then you’re free to write your way to Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern on the moon, or opening a two-man detective agency in San Francisco and waiting for a certain Miss O’Shaunessy to walk in.
Say you wanted to write a pastiche of Waiting for Godot. You don’t need to name your characters Vladimir and Estragon. Maybe you just begin with two guys hanging out under a tree, waiting for something. Maybe you throw in a clever giveaway: instead of your version of Estragon having trouble pulling on his boots, give him a laptop computer that he’s trying to reboot. You don’t have to do any copying of dialogue, just remember that they’re prone to semi-elliptical statements. Toss in a more obvious reference by having them discuss whether to hang themselves. The original has a third character deliver a long nonsensical peroration. You can do the same, if you want.
All that can be accomplished in a few lines, and it is, as far as I’m concerned, a pastiche, the rest of the page is yours to convey whatever you want. Once you build the bicycle, ride it where you want.
That’s just me. I have no investment in anyone else’s definition. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern is neither improved nor harmed by calling it a pastiche or not, after all.
I wouldn’t call it plagiarism, but, parenthetically, I found out a little while ago that Jordan Peele is working on a TV (?) version of Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country. So excited! I really liked the book, and it’s a good thing that a more than competent person will be bringing it to life.
This is the sense meant by “paraquel,” mentioned above, as distinct from sequel or prequel: a work that covers the same time period as another but from a different perspective.
There are lots of examples of this. If you want another one that plays off of Shakespeare, Christopher Moore’s Fool tells the story of King Lear from the point of view of the king’s Fool (who Moore names “Pocket”). I recommend it – the book is hilarious, despite being based on one of Shakespeare’s bleakest and most depressing tragedies.
The much-revioed Mary Reilly tells the story of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde from the POV of Jeckyll’s maid.
Back around the time that the deLaurentiis remake of King Kong came out, someone published My Story, telling it from Kong’s POV.
Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tapes tells the story of Dracula from the Count’s perspective.
Peter Watts’ the Things tells the story of The Thing (the John Carpenter film version) from the Thing’s POV.
Heinlein worked this one on himself, with part of his last novel, To Sail Beyond the Sunset telling a story from Time Enough for Love through a different character’s eyes.
Come to think of it, using a subsidiary character in one work as the main character in another goes back at least to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in relation to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
And farther back, by Shakespeare himself: Falstaff from Henry IV in The Merry Maids of Windsor. And Orson Welles’ movie Chimes at Midnight retells the story of Prince Hal/Henry V from Falstaff’s perspective.
Isn’t this a pretty ancient storytelling tradition? Ovid’s Metamorphoses arguably fits in the tradition; and in any case, telling new stories about bit players in another story surely isn’t something that modern authors invented.
I’m not sure how well these recent additions to the thread fit the OP – his example gives an already-existing story told through the eyes of non-major characters. I tried to keep to that in my additions. If you’re going to include cases where someone takes a character from someone else’s story and simply uses them in another unrelated story, the list of cases becomes huge.
Ovid did this a LOT. Not just in the Metamorphoses, but with his other poems, where he had stories including Polyphemus and Glaucus and others.
Heck, look at Virgil’s Aeneid.
The best example I know was not a pastiche, but shared universe describes it accurately. The novel Psychohistorical Crisis by Don Kingsbury takes place in what is quite obviously Asimov’s Foundation universe. But he changed all the names. For example, the planet that was obviously Trantor became Splendid Wisdom and the inhabitants of one planet were called the Frightful People. The author explained that he did that to avoid any copyright problems (he was a colleague of mine).
Another author known for paraquels is Joan Aiken, who wrote five “companion novels” to Jane Austen’s works. Emma is retold from another character’s viewpoint in Jane Fairfax; Mansfield Revisited take up the story with a focus on Susan, Fanny’s younger sister.
Problem is that while I get it’s meant to be “parallel sequel”, I read the “para” as its own suffix, so it just become basically a time-specific form of “parafiction”, which is already a distinct, different thing (fiction that pretends to be true as an aesthetic conceit).
