Sunday, September 13, 2015

Bengali/Indian Ghost Stories: Styles Brainstorm

TopicMy Storybook will be about different ghost stories found in the Bengali and Indian folktales. My goal is to find three to four different ghost stories and tie them together for the storybook. One story I am confident enough to include is, A Ghostly Wife, and another story I want to use is, The Boy Who Was Caught. There are lots of ghost stories to choose from for the others so I don't think that will be too hard.

Bibliography:
1. A Ghostly Wife, from the Bengali Folktales unit found on UnTextbook, by Lal Behari Day (1912).

2.The Boy Who Was Caught, from the Indian Ghost Stories book, by S. Mukerji (1917).

Possible Styles
Me telling the stories. My first choice is to write the story in a  first-person style. I am going to be the main character in the story who tells the ghost stories to other characters. For this, I am going to go with a frametale to connect my separate stories. I could be in a classroom where I am telling the stories from my own experience or I could be camping with some friends and telling the story there. 

Field trip. This could be a toss-up between a first-person or a third-person. I could insert myself with some friends who are taking a field trip around India or Bangladesh where they stop at different places to listen to the ghost stories of that particular place. The ghost stories might be told by some elderly of that place or by me as I have heard the stories beforehand. 

Some crazy person being a storyteller. This would be an anthology or a frametale. I could have a crazy person tell different ghost stories of different places as a warning for people to not visit that place. But people will avoid his warning and visit anyway. Only to find out what he said were true. They escape barely. And I could have them come back to search for that crazy person only to find out there never was a crazy person there to begin with.

Kids being kidsThis could be a first-person story where I might talk about my experiences with ghosts as a kid. Or it can be third-person story where some kids are talking about ghosts while visiting a old holy site where they are not supposed to go. I can have them trapped inside that site and have them tell the scariest ghost stories they can tell to scare the others. I am not sure if it will be an anthology or a frametale. It could be a frametale as I am having them sit inside a place and tell those stories.


Since I am talking about ghosts, I have to include this picture:

Casper: A Spirited Beginning movie poster.
Found on Wikipedia.



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