When we were making the stories, our first task was figuring how to distill all of what was to become the lore of the combined Craker and human populations after all of the characters we had grown to know and love had died. We eventually settled on picking 4 characters – Toby, Zeb, Snowman, and Crake. Each group member picked 1 character to write approximately 20 sentence-long pages about.
Although we devised our stories independently, we worked on the actual art together (for the most part). This was so we could create consistency in our visuals – whenever we draw humans, or pigoons, we followed the same style. There was some divergence in our stories (for example, Sarah’s story has no human characters: Zeb’s a snake, and the Rev is a dog), but we didn’t want things to seem like they were all written by one author. Each story is told in our own distinct voice and handwriting (sorry in advance if my handwriting’s difficult to decipher).
We also drew a lot from collaging techniques, mirroring the “gleaning” of the God’s Gardeners, as well as the post-Flood society. Luckily, Christy had a ton of stickers, which helped us add a certain childlike charm to the way we constructed our stories. I had a lot of fun making a two-page collage spread (pp. 29-30), where I used a mix of flattened dried flowers/leaves, tissue paper, and flower stickers to create the God’s Gardeners’ rooftop garden.
I drew my greatest inspiration from Aesop’s fables, because of the instructive nature of Toby’s story. There were some deviations, clearly – I chose to be very explicit with all of my morality, going for an inversion of the essential rule of “show, don’t tell.” Kind of boring, but realistically, it’s what the Crakers (and their perpetual questioning) would prefer. At one point, my story innocently glosses over the deadly fight between the MaddAddams and the remaining Painballers, with a little footnote – if you want to hear more, you can read it elsewhere. That way, I get to placate the prying Crakers, without having to include too much of that difficult-to-explain gore.
We also worked on consistency in terms of Craker lore – for instance, we decided that all characters would move to the “sky” with Oryx and Crake after death, and that Oryx and Crake would exist as humans as well as godlike figures. Since our stories take place a few generations after the events of MaddAddam, we figured some things would become codified as the combined human/Craker culture progressed.
Suggested Readings
This paper tracks the shifting in storytelling methods – from indigenous oral tradition (and its role as both instruction and entertainment), to classroom strategy, to fusions with visual art methods and digital storytelling. Since our stories serve as a transcription of the oral tradition started by Snowman and Toby, it’s valuable to look at the roles that storytelling plays.
A study was conducted where 172 children (between the ages of 4 and 12) had one of Aesop’s fables read to them (the fox and the crow). The paper shows how understanding of the fable and its lesson shifts as children grow older: changing from “the story is about a fox” to “don’t get tricked.” As a writer, it’s important to think about the level of understanding that your students will have – sometimes a lesson will need to be explicitly told if you are reaching a younger audience.
Plus, a nice digital collection of Aesop’s fables from the Library of Congress, each with the moral stated clearly at the end of the story.
