Reading Notes: Arabian Nights, Part A

                                                Scheherazade telling her stories, online source

While reading the Arabian Nights stories, I realized that shockingly morbid details are quite captivating. I am a huge fan of happy stories, but a story doesn’t have to start peachy keen to end that way! Nor does it have to have a happy ending- I know- but they are much more fun when they do. I was curious when reading these stories why everyone was seeming to take others’ words for face value. It was as if deceit was not something to be expected from people in this culture. At first, I felt these stories flowed too easily to the point of being unrealistic, but then I realized… They are stories! They don’t have to be realistic. For my storytelling this week, I want to fill in the third story that she could not remember. Instead of a story of humans turning to animals, I think it would be awesome to make the third old man an animal that turned to a human. I want to make it easily understood and straightforward as these stories were. That made them more captivating because I did not have to use my brain too much, and I was onto the next story before I even knew it. I do want my story to include a lesson for the sultan who is being told the stories. I noticed that the phrase, “O, (insert name here)” was used a lot, alluding to her saying “O, Sultan,” so I would like to use that element as well in my own story. Another appealing aspect to these stories is that they do not have much dialogue. They have some, but the story does not rely too heavily on it. I find myself including a lot of dialogue because that is easiest to write for me, but this is not always a good thing. I will try to adapt my writing this time to rely more on the storyteller than the dialogue as these stories do.

Arabian Nights from The Arabian Nights' Entertainment by Andrew Lang, online source