Welcome to day 16 of 40 craft lessons.
If the story was finished by sunrise, that would be the last day of Scheherazade; Shahriyar would have killed her, just as he had killed many women before her. Night after night, Scheherazade told an unfinished story, and by the end—after one thousand and one nights, a symbolic number—listening to the stories healed Shahriyar’s savagery.
One Thousand and One Nights is a superb example of an ancient literary technique widely used in the East: the frame story. But why was this form of storytelling so favored in Iranian, Indian, and Middle Eastern literature? In classical Iranian literature, for instance, we have many masterworks written in this style.
From a storytelling point of view, this technique creates suspense and entertainment. The reader follows the story within the story but cannot abandon it entirely, because the frame story is an unfinished thread; we want to know what ultimately happens to Scheherazade. Additionally, passing knowledge indirectly through storytelling has long been considered a form of wisdom in the East.
Picture books usually don’t have enough space for more than one story within a frame story. Still, some picture books feature a frame story longer than the typical 40 pages; Simone (2024, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Minnie Phan), for example, is 48 pages. The story begins when a wildfire threatens the town. On the way to safety, Simone’s mother tells her about when she was a child in Vietnam, and her town was flooded.
Through books like Simone, we see that the frame story is not just a historical literary technique—it continues to inspire and engage readers today.
I hope reading this blog post has given you new ideas. See you tomorrow for Day 17.