Welcome to day 28 of 40 craft lessons.
Making a good story by retelling a tale—or by being inspired by one—demands good craft. I exclude religious stories from this list because those stories have their readership secured through faith. They already have their customers.
The challenge is to take a tale retold for generations and shape it into a story for today’s market. Books with large chunks of text and illustrations don’t do the job. The real point is this: how do you adapt a tale into a marketable picture book?
Let’s take a look at a story from a South Indian folktale: Kadooboo! (2024, Shruthi Rao, Darshika Varma). The book tells the story of a boy, Kabir, who is given a bag of hot kadooboo to bring to his Amma.
The natural question that comes to mind is whether the boy brings the food safe and sound to its destination. But the story adds another question on top: would Kabir remember the name of the food? And this simple question made me turn the pages! I guessed the resolution would be that the boy delivers the food, but the story ended with another twist, which made me say, “Oh, no!”—in a very positive and funny way, though.
Hope reading this blog post has given you new ideas. See you tomorrow for Day 29.
