Given the opportunity to tell and write their own stories directly after hearing folk tales, 15 children, aged 7 to 10, used methods similar to those of professional adult writers to reshape 52 traditional tales. Three times, children retold the original tale; in 9 cases, they borrowed heavily from the original, retaining concrete details and situations; in 21 instances, children recreated the story, extracting a single element, such as a character type, from the source and placing it into their own context; in 10 stories, there was blending of the plot setting, story situation, or characters from several sources, such as other stories and television shows; 9 older children abstracted the major theme but transformed the other story elements until the original folk tale was no longer recognizable. As older children produced more blendings and transformations while the younger ones relied more on borrowings and recreations, maturation appears to play an important part in children's reshaping of literature. Children seem to move gradually from borrowing and recreating to blending and transforming. Blending appears to be a bridge between reliance on an author's ideas and greater independence in the creative process. All children, however, appear to find intricate ways to fuse traditional literary elements with material from their own experiences. (MM)