Reading Notes: Moon Origins and Tricksters

When reading the assigned stories, The Man in the Moon and The Tiger, The Brahman, and the Jackal are the two that stood out as the most potential for my story telling.

The Man in the Moon:

To start, I absolutely love origin stories.  I love stories that are creative explanations of the world around us, and I love the way a lot of them reflect the culture they came from.

The story is about a problem that many people in the modern day have: gratefulness.  A blacksmith does not like his line of work and believes that being a variety of other things such as a rock on the side of a mountain, a rock cutter, the sun, and the moon would be much better.  A wise man grants him these wishes but every time he transforms, he realizes that each of them have their own problems.  Ultimately, this story is about being grateful with what you have.  By the end of this story, he is begging to be a blacksmith again.

I would make this story more complex and longer, as well as make it more relatable for modern day readers.  I think that would be a great goal for my writing in this class.  Many stories with wonderful messages are just so foreign and it would be good to have more modern translations.  Some possibilities are a student that wants to switch majors a bunch, a city person wanting to live away from society, then the mountains, etc.

Be Grateful Picture found on Flickr

The Tiger, The Brahman, and the Jackal:

This story stood out to be because I loved the plot twist that happens.  I also enjoy the style that many Indian myths have.  Sometimes they surprise me with how clever they are such as this one!
The lesson to be learned from this story is to not let your guard down.  Both the tiger and the Brahman were fooled.

We have three characters in this story, a cunning tiger that gets out of his trap, a helpless and foolish Brahman that lets the tiger out and is about to get eater, and a Jackal that is much more cunning than he first appears.

Not only does the tiger escape and gets tricked back into the cage, but in the middle of the story the Brahman looks around for someone to feel sorry for him and all of the things such as the road and the trees just tell him he is ungrateful.

A story like this has quite the complexity to create a plot twist that has such power, but I believe I could do this fairly easily.  Maybe I will do a scenario where someone trying to do the tricking ends up being the fool.  Such as a bully trying to get a kid to eat/drink something laced with concentrated capsaicin and the bully ends up being the one that eats/drinks it!  Along the way maybe the kid being bullied tells a teacher and the teacher tricks the student into eating the capsaicin!  Once again, I want to make these stories more appropriate for modern readers.