Week 3: Storybook Styles

Believe me. Choosing a topic was a hard thing to do. I loved all of the ideas that I came up with last week. The winner is: CSI Epics! However, I think I may put a special twist on it, just as Laura Gibbs gave me the idea of.  After reading some of the recommended sources, I have come up with a few that I would like to use in my storybook. As Laura stated, it may be interesting to tie in my idea of a Karma storybook into this CSI idea. I really appreciated her idea on humanizing a detective character that would act as Karma. I think that some of the readings I will use from the Ramayana will include:

Bibliography:

1) "Vali's Death" Ramayana, The Epic of Rama, Prince of India, condensed into English verse by Romesh Dutt (1899).

2) "Ravana's Death" Indian Myth and Legend by Donald A. Mackenzie (1913).

3) "Death of Drona" Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists by Sister Nivedita (1914).

4) "Death of Krishna" Indian Myth and Legend by Donald A. Mackenzie (1913).

I also may include a CSI of the deer dying in:

"Pandu and His Wives" Mahabharata translated by K. M. Ganguli (1883).

I think that the idea of a CSI storybook would be the easiest to read if it came from a narrative style. In this case, I would simply lay out the facts of what we know and how the investigation went. I would probably style this writing in a “what we know, what we found in the investigation, and what we have concluded” way.

Some other ideas that come to mind. One is to use a style in which it seems like you are reading the papers filled out by the detective or crime scene investigators. For this, I think it would be really interesting to see the report on each character after the murder was already solved (or maybe in some cases it is unsolvable?). One difficult thing about this style would be connecting to the reader. If they are reading a report rather than a story will they still be interested? I know that some people love stuff like this and like to randomly look at things such as a prisoner’s last dinner before being executed (unless I’m the only one that clicks on those random articles on Facebook).

(Image Information: Possible layout of a CSI storybook. Source: Scholastic)

Another idea is to have it laid out in a murder dinner manner. In this case, I would present the storyline before the murder and lay out the characters that are possible suspects. I think this would be really fun because perhaps the investigator could carry out the murder! You never know. I almost feel that in this style, I would not answer who was the murderer, but rather let the reader make their own conclusion (unless they have read the piece or continued reading and found out who it was in my “Author’s note”.

As far as the characters go, I think the only ones I am going to connect from story-to-story will be the actual crime scene investigators. I will have to do more research to see if it will be possible to logically connect the deaths I will be writing about in any way. I guess it shouldn’t be too hard once I get some more readings under my belt. I mean, I do feel like a big idea in Indian culture is that every event has a cause and effect!