Welcome to day 15 of 40 craft lessons. Not all picture books should be funny, nor should they only tackle simple topics. We need picture books on every subject, especially the tough ones. In fact, those are often the most needed, particularly these days. But writing about complex topics for young readers is tricky. The […]
Welcome to day 14 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books. Imagine a fly-on-the-wall telling you a story! That’s third-person objective POV in a nutshell. If you like a fancier term, some call it “camera-eye POV.” This POV shows the story through an outside observer who reports only actions and dialogue. It doesn’t peek
Day 14: Third-person Objective POV Read More »
Welcome to day 13 of 40 craft lessons. If second-person POV sounds unfamiliar, what would you say about first-person plural POV (“we”, “us”)? It’s strange, isn’t it? But once upon a time, the first-person plural was the natural choice for oral storytelling. Many cultures told stories not from an individual’s perspective but from the
Day 13: First-person Plural POV Read More »
Welcome to day 12 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books. Third-person POV (“she,” “her”) is versatile. It can be an omniscient, god-like POV that knows everything—thoughts, feelings, and experiences of all characters—and moves freely between multiple characters’ minds. We don’t see the omniscient POV very often anymore. What we usually encounter is either
Day 12: Third-Person Limited POV Read More »
Welcome to Day 10 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books. Choosing the best Point of View (POV) for a story is one of the trickiest decisions writers have to make. Many confuse the narrator with POV, so let’s start there. The narrator is the entity telling the story: a character, an object, an
Day 10: First-person POV Read More »
Welcome to Day 9 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books. A narrator brings us, readers, into the story world and honestly shares events and thoughts. Well… narrates, yes. Honesty? not necessarily. An unreliable narrator doesn’t lie maliciously. They genuinely misunderstand or misinterpret a situation. And that’s exactly what makes them such a versatile
Day 9: Unreliable Narrator Read More »
Welcome to Day 8 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books. What could immerse the reader better in the story world and give a clearer view of it than a narrator from within that world? That narrator isn’t necessarily a person; it can be an inanimate object, and we see this abundantly in picture
Day 8: Inanimate Narrator Read More »
Welcome to Day 7 of 40 craft lessons. One of the most popular pieces of writing advice is “raise the stakes.” And one of the most misunderstood ones! For me, that advice went in one ear and out the other. Stakes are for adult thrillers, right? I don’t write in that genre. So why would
Day 7: Story Stake Read More »
Welcome to Day 5 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books. Many terms in storytelling are confusing. Luckily, “character arc” is one of the clearer ones. Throughout a story, either the main character changes (dynamic arc) or the main character changes the world (flat arc). In both cases, the story revolves around that change.
Day 5: Character Arc Read More »
Welcome to Day 4 of 40 craft lessons. For a long time, animal characters have dominated children’s books. In recent years, human main characters have become more common. So, when is it still better to use animal characters? It’s tempting to choose animals simply because they’re cute. But cuteness alone isn’t enough to make a
Day 4: Animal Characters Read More »
I will write here later
I read this book merely because of its title. My reasoning was that when an author is so careful with the title, the story will most likely be good. And it was not good, but brilliant.
Seven resin collectors
The story happens in a small, impoverished fictional village called Dukuh Paruk in the middle of Java Island. The main character, the 14-year-old Rasus, is in love with an 11-year-old girl, Srintil, whose grandfather believes she has a talent for Ronggeng—the Javanese dance. Moreover, in Rasus’s imagination, the girl is a replacement for Rasus’s mother, whom he had lost in childhood. A Ronggeng dancer isn’t a simple entertainer. The dancer is considered a sacred vessel for the village’s ancestral spirit and is expected to be available to the men of the village! I am not sure if it is comparable to the “sacred prostitute” in the temples that we read in the ancient Sumerian stories.
I read the first book in the trilogy in German—Die Tänzerin von Dukuh Paruk. Sadly, the other two volumes aren’t available to buy. In English, the trilogy is published in one volume with the title “The Dancer”.
The central conflict of the story is that Rasus has to emotionally put up with the tradition that everyone in his village believes in or benefits from. Rasus grows out of this calamity; he criticizes his village and its culture. In a nutshell, the story is the classic archetype: a boy becomes a man.
Tohari’s writing voice brings this archetype to life, especially his descriptions of nature and animals, which immerse me in the atmosphere of a Javanese village. The main theme of the story is the battle between tradition and humanity. In spite of the dire atmosphere in the story, it is very optimistic. Poverty and tradition cannot kill the humanity in Rasus.