The problem of the pilgrim
Having been in love with the story of Scheherazade since childhood, I've always known I wanted to eventually try my hand at a retelling. I've had several different ideas throughout the years, but never one that felt exactly right. I was always approaching it as a novel, not seeing any way to work the king's development from murderous nut-ball to someone you might plausibly be happy seeing Scheherazade marry with any shorter length.
But I recently had the idea for a short story, framing the whole tale within the thousandth-and-first night, when Scheherazade's last story finishes before dawn and Shahryar must decide whether to spare her or not. We know the framework of the original story, we don't necessarily need it elaborated on. But how they resolve the issues of guilt/forgiveness/what the heck they're going to do now need to be dealt with, and I had the idea to resolve that not through their own interactions, but through the action and development of the characters in Scheherazade's last story.
Ideally, I actually had already formed an idea for one of Scheherazade's tales a long time ago, and as it dealt with a similar theme, it worked perfectly as her last story.
Basically, it revolves around a woman living somewhere in eastern europe/eurasia who's village is attacked by foreign raiders/soldiers. (Otherwise known as the history of the silk road-area in stereo!) Their leader kills the woman's husband, and attempts to rape her, but she takes him by surprise, wounds him and escapes. Making it to safety, she swears vengeance, and determines that wherever her husband's killer goes, she'll follow and finish him off. But before she can follow through, the raider's own men turn on him and kill him themselves, thus robbing her of her revenge. With her plan ruined, and no home to return to, she instead patrols the land as a bit of a Lone Ranger, and in her travels, rescues and befriends a wandering pilgrim. They travel together for some time, becoming very close, and the woman grows to love the pilgrim. He gets sick, and becomes dangerously ill. The woman rushes him to a town and finds him a doctor, terrified that he will die. However, as the doctor begins treating him, the woman recognizes scars on the pilgrim's body that match the wound she inflicted on the raiders' supposedly dead leader, and realizes that not only has she been traveling with her enemy the whole time, but that she's fallen in love with him. Heartbroken and horrified, the woman prepares to do what she pledged, and kill her husband's murderer. She confronts him as soon as he is stable, and he admits that he is the bandit's leader, reformed and turned mendicant in hope of making some reparation for his previous actions. She reveals her identity to him, as well as her determination to kill him, but he begs her to spare him so that he can continue his pilgrimage, and not die without having expunged some of his sins. The woman is too torn to do anything, and storms out. From there she must decide whether to spare him or kill him, and whether she can continue her relationship with the pilgrim, knowing who he was. In order to come to an answer, she has him tell her his story, from his "death" to now, and decides from there whether she feels he has genuinely changed enough to let him live. (In story-land, it's the character in Scheherezade's role who gets to choose death or life, instead of Shahryar's, which is frankly how it should be. Obviously, you can assume there's a happy ending, since this has to link into Shahryar's and Scheherazade's story as well.)
Everything's fairly straightforward so far. The story will have three main branches (I've done this kind of set up before, so it feels like cheating, but it works, and it gives an interesting Canterbury Tales old-timey feel to the story, so I feel justified doing it again.) The prologue where a town elder comes upon the woman crying alone after her failed confrontation with the pilgrim. They begin to talk, and she eventually begins to tell her own story, which is the second branch. This continues until she asks the pilgrim to save himself by recounting his story, which is the third, and then all three combine in the resolution/epilogue.
The prologue shouldn't pose any problem; the woman's story is already partly written, and though the start's a bit hazy, I am confident that it should resolve itself with little trouble (in fact, my biggest concern with her part is just coming up with good names for all the characters.)
But the pilgrim's story intimidates me, because although by the time of the telling he is a changed man and haunted by his past, when the story starts he's an evil, murdering, stealing, raping, pillaging, maiming villain who deserves a slow and torturous death. (For reals, he's just legit evil at the start. Like, after the heroine wounds him and runs off, he vows to find her, and starts torturing and killing any women who resemble her until he can actually get revenge on her personally. [You see how that ties into Shahryar's history of punishing blameless women for his wife's sin?]) So not only am I going to have to write his change, I'm going to have to write him as he was before the change. I have to make the change believable, to tell enough of his villainy that the reader can hate him, but then not enough that they can't understand forgiving him in the end. The only thing making it better will be the slight tinge of hindsight in its telling, but there isn't much. At least he has years of culture and circumstance encouraging him to be a villain, and its in the removal of that environment that he comes to see his actions as they actually are. (And he's young, and hasn't had as much time to start questioning his actions as someone older would.) That's what makes it believable to me that he might change, and I hope I can get that across. But it's going to be tough. If it works it will be worth it, but gosh it's not going to be fun. I just basically hate writing (in-depth about) really evil villains, and I have no choice this time.
My writing is partly to entertain myself, but a great deal of it is just therapy, pretty much writing myself a better world with happier endings. (Call it escapism if you want, but I could be dealing with my frustration by doing drugs or beating up homeless people instead, and I choose this option, so shut it.) Writing someone truly horrible is not fun, and they usually only exist in my stories as shadows. (My standard villains are either really sympathetic, often victims themselves or heroes who faltered, and end up converting to good guys, or really evil ones who I don't bother making "sympathetic". Every human has the makings of a villain, the only thing stopping them is power and opportunity. It's not complex, and I don't feel the need to delve into it. If you're human, you understand how and why they do what they do. You don't need to be made to sympathize.)
So, I really like the idea of the story, I really like how it relates to the frame story of Scheherazade and the king, and I'm looking forward to being able to write it at some point, but I can't think about writing the pilgrim's branch without serious trepidation.