Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Storytelling Style: A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words

Related to the Museum style, you can write your story as if it were a commentary on a work of art, using details that you notice in the work of art to prompt the choices you make in telling your version of the story.

So, the first thing to do is to find an image you can use to prompt your story. That might be a painting or a sculpture that find at an online site like Wikipedia or any of the online museum sites, or it might be an illustration from a book that you find at Internet Archive.

If you are fortunate enough to find a large-size version of the image you can "zoom in" on details. If you don't already have a favorite app for image editing, a site like PicMonkey.com online allows you to take an image, cropping and resizing to get the different images you want to include in your story. If you the story is for your blog, you'll want images that are 400 pixels wide; then you can select "original size" when you include them in Blogger.

So, for example, if you were to tell the story of Krishna lifting up Mount Govardhan, you could start with this 400-pixel wide version of the painting itself (Metropolitan Museum of Artca. 1590–95, Lahore):


Because the Metropolitan makes a detailed version of the image available, you could then zoom in on these detailed images, also 400 pixels wide, as you tell the story, letting the details of the painting prompt your version of the story.

So, for example, here is Krishna himself, with so many details you could include in a description of him in your story!


You can see the people and the animals taking refuse under the mountain:


And you can also see the animals who live on the mountain!