You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built in the human plan. We come with it!
-Margaret Atwood
We, humans, have been telling, re-telling and listening to stories since time immemorial. It’s inherent in us. We’ve grown with it. We’re growing each day, sometimes listening to someone’s stories whereas sometimes by telling our own. Aren’t we part of someone’s stories if seen, advertently or inadvertently?
Title: Write India Stories
Author: Multiple Authors
Editor: Vinita Dawra Nangia
Genre: Short stories
Publisher: Times Group Books
Pages: 310
No of Stories: 36
Price: Rs. 243/- (amazon)
This book is the result of the competition that was held across India. Excerpts were given by the established authors (you can see names on the cover page) and based on the excerpts, the story needs to be weaved. The passage should appear somewhere in the story. At once, this technique of writing took me to school days where in English workbooks, we’d be given some fragmented sentences, some passages, or some excerpts to be weaved into a story using our imaginative skills. The only difference here is in the difficulty level.
Out of 25k received entries, 36 award-winning entries have been selected to adore this book. Each of the established authors had given their own excerpts pertaining to the genre they were established in. For instance, mythology for Amish, Romance for Preeti and Ravindra and alike. The writers can choose any theme to weave a story. In this book, 3-4 stories have been published under the column/excerpt of each author. The interesting aspect is that you can observe the same excerpt narrated in different ways. Moreover, you can read the stories pertaining to 11 different excerpts given by the same number of authors and belonging to different genres such as history, mythology, crime, thriller, romance etc, all in a single place with 36 different narrating styles. The stories don’t run to more than 5-7 pages, hence, reading them appears a cakewalk.
Though each story is uniquely written/narrated, reading multiple stories weaved from the same excerpt may appear exhausting sometimes. Since the stories have been written by multiple authors, all the stories aren’t equally engaging. You’ll feel the need to skip some of them. Nonetheless, I feel that such uniquely crafted books should be part of your collection.
©Shashank
You can also check the other reviews by clicking on the suggestions below. Eager to hear from you. Let me know your thoughts. Also, thanks Aaditya for lending this book. It’s been with me for a long time.
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