One more story: Of tall-tales, pointless anecdotes, and stories within a story

According to my mom, I started making things up before I could write. I would take a pencil and draw stick figures on her recipe notebook (which thankfully survived the abuse and now belongs to me) and tell stories. I started writing things down back in highschool, though the stories (and poems, ugh) were of questionable grammar and of even more dubious plot. I tried to learn from the masters: Edgar Allan Poe, the then not-so-famous J.K. Rowling, the ghost writers for The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and the other denizens of St. Joseph Academy's library.

Years later, I go to college and find the Humanities and Filipinana section of the UST library. I meet more masters (Agatha Christie, Bob Ong, Jessica Zafra, JRR Tolkien, among others), but I think the most interesting master I met there was Scheherazad. In case you don't know this particular Persian queen, she's the heroine of One Thousand and One Nights or for Disney's Aladdin fans, Arabian Nights.

One Thousand and One Nights is actually a collection of stories and folk tales told by the said queen to the vengeful Shahryar. You see, the said king's first wife was unfaithful to him and in an epic fit of bitterness he takes a wife each day, and beheads the wife he took yesterday. Enter Sheherezad, a vizier's daughter who obviously had no plans of losing her head after a day with the king. She goes and tells him a story the first night and ends halfway, at dawn. I'd like to think that the story she told him was enganging enough since the king spared her life the next day to hear the end of the story.

Tricky Sheherazad had other plans though, since after finishing the first story, she begins a second one and much like the first, it was engaging and ended halfway. She used several literary techniques, covered various genres and even used parody and satire. This went on for several nights, one thousand and one nights in fact. As the legend goes, on the last night, she told the king that she had no more tales to tell him. By then, the king had grown wiser and kinder with her stories, and he had also fallen in love with her.

I guess my point with this post is, if I were Sheherazad, would the king scream OFF WITH HER HEAD on the first night? It'll be nice to be like Sheherazad, a thousand and one stories and none of them are boring or unfinished or met with indifference.


PS. If you're interested with the legendary queen, you should watch Hallmark's 3-hour miniseries Arabian Nights with John Leguizamo as the wiseass lamp genie.