Storybook Styles

Jason and Medea by Carle van Loo (1759).

For my storybook, I am going to combine a couple of my ideas to make a storybook concentrating on ancient couples. I plan on including a story about Hypermnestra and the drama surrounding her failure to kill her husband, a story about Hector and Andromache, and a story about Medea and Jason. I am unsure what couple I would like to focus my last story on, but I want to display a variety of relationships. I love that Hypermnestra gets a storybook ending, but I love the tragedy of Medea and Jason's story. I am considering doing a story on either Paris and Helen, or Orpheus and Eurydice. I think they both have pretty intriguing stories that I would love to be able to explore.

I want to tell my stories in first person. I like being able to get into the mind of a character and really explore individual perceptions of events. I am choosing characters and relationships that have really powerful stories to be told and I think one of the best ways to do justice to these stories and to really help people to see and be moved by them is to put them directly inside of the minds of the people who lived them.

One idea I have for the story is to organize it into a frame shift. I would have a woman who has uncovered a collection of ancient diaries, and each story would be written as a diary entry or several diary entries from one of the women (Hypermnestra, Andromache, etc). I like the idea of having someone reading diary entries from these women because I think it would cool to also get to write about how the stories affected the woman reading them, its allows for a secondary way to portray the relationships of the characters.

I also like the idea of putting the stories into letter format. I think it would be cool particularly for the story of Hypermnestra to display the correspondence between her and her husband, and reveal the story through each of their letters. For the story of Medea and Jason I would love to tell Medea's side of the story in a letter she leaves in her home prior to her escape on the chariot. She is a character about whom I have conflicted feelings. I sympathize with her on many accounts, but her killing her children and getting away with it leaves such an unsettling feeling at the end of her story. She is a character I would love to get inside of and to give her a chance to tell her side of the story.

I am also toying with the idea of organizing my storybook to be more of an anthology. I like the freedom of an anthology. Because each of these couples' relationships and stories are so different, I like the idea of being able to tell each one in a different way. I think Medea's story could be so easily and powerfully told through a series of diary entries, but Hypermnestra's story fits so well in a correspondence format. I picture her writing a letter to her husband confessing to the plot her father made against him, and begging for his support at her trial.

Finally the idea of using an anthology and simply writing each of the stories in first person real time as they happen could be really powerful. I like this method because it is simple. There aren't any excess details which can detract from the power and the lessons of each person's story. I have chosen these couples because I am so moved and intrigued by the stories they have to tell, by their minds, their feelings, and their actions. I like the idea of just telling the story, from their perspective, with their candid thoughts, feelings, and actions as they happen. I think telling stories this way can sometimes lend a feeling of credibility. honesty, and identification to the characters.

Bibliography: The Medea  by Euripidies, translated by David Grene and Richard Lattimore (1944). Print.

"Hypermnestra to Lynceus" by P. Ovidius Naso from The Epistles of Ovid translated by J. Nunn, R. Lea, and J. Rodwell (1813). Web Source: Perseus Digital Library

"Hector and Andromache" from Homer's Iliad, translated by Alfred J. Church (1907). Web Source: Un-Textbook

"Orpheus and Eurydice" from Age of Fable: Vol I & II: Stories of Gods and Heroes by Thomas Bulfinch (1913). Web Source: Bartleby