Neil Gaiman's Inventing Aladdin- A poem about stories

If you have to walk a mile in the shoes of Scheherazade, how would you do?

That is not a simple question to answer. You have to consider the very nature of the instinct of self preservation itself. How does it function and, given what life has to throw at us on a daily basis, why is it consistently successful?

But enough of pointless philosophy. Now answer the question: if you have to tell stories so that your life depended on it, how good a storyteller would you be? I remember my freshman seminar class where the professor asked us the question: if Star Wars is the answer, what is the question? We were studying feminism and science fiction and unfortunately, being eighteen year old noobs and culture Visigoths, none of us were able to answer that question properly. But I digress.

Ultimately, that is what the 1001 nights of tales is all about- the story of a brave and clever girl who is one of the most learned people in her country. She is public spirited enough to try and stop the practice of state sponsored kidnap, rape and beheading of young girls by royal fiat. She offers herself as a sacrifice to take a stab at the problem. But what we soon discover is that personalizing the problem had given her a whole new perspective. She can survive but only if her stories are good enough.

Such is the theme of Neil Gaiman's Inventing Aladdin, a poem about the process of story telling. We meet Scheherazade who , at the end of a story, gets a cue from her sister, Dunyazade for another. So, invention begins inside her head and she starts the story of a layabout lad in China called Aladdin. As the night wears on, she finishes on a cliffhanger: Aladdin trapped inside the underground treasure trove.

Remarkably, what we see is the development of the tale that takes place. This is a key aspect of the writing process itself that manifests within the entire poem: how does Scheherazade come up with her stories?

And one can never forget the fact that the stakes have never been higher. If the stories stop coming or become less interesting, she has to pay for it with her life. So it is literally a matter of life and death- the reward of the storyteller is to be spared each day. Her advances and royalties are to be counted in the currency of hours.

Neil Gaiman often talks about the process of the constructing stories. The creative act is wrapped in mystery to those who are not writers; however, those who are would tell you that it is all about hard work and unpredictable directions of exploration. The whole exercise is demonstrated admirably in the poem. It is a metaphor about metaphors, a story about stories- where they really come from.

Cultivating anticipation and building to an anticlimax are the hallmarks of a good storyteller. Unlike other writers, Scheherazade does not have the option of a rewrite and therefore must rely on putting on a show spontaneously: a veritable exercise in improv that never ends.

What interests me most is the question of psychological impact. One of the most important question about the mythology of comic books in the Twentieth Century was asked by Alan Moore. Moore simply took on the idea of a vigilante in costume (the essence of every super hero comic) and asked: how psychologically warped do you have to be to put on a costume and then put yourself in harm's way only to earn the anonymous praise of an indifferent society?

Similarly, one can ask the question: what would the effect of livingn the edge every night for three years or more would have on you if you had to come up with a gripping bestseller every night? Would that scar you for life, the trauma of anticipation of doom? How would that affect your world view of everything? Would you look at every individual you meet, every object you come across, as a source for stories?

Would that not make you into a vampire of sorts, someone who feeds on the life stories of others only to preserve her own? But then again, authors are by nature emotional vampires who feed on the life energies of other people, twist them into narratives of their own and make them their own stories. And as written word survives the flesh, that in it self is a transformation no less permanent than that of the un-dead.

But ultimately, it is about staying alive by telling stories.