Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling

If they didn’t want me to steal from their story, they shouldn’t have invited me into it – that’s my view.

little abstract patterns of experience,

And as the servant, I have to do what a good servant should. I have to be ready to attend to my work at regular hours. I have to anticipate where the story wants to go, and find out what can make the progress easier – by doing research, that is to say: by spending time in libraries, by going to talk to people, by finding things out. I have to keep

And I want to stress again that the business of the storyteller is with the story-line, with the path. You can make your story-wood, your invented world, as rich and full as you like, but be very, very careful not to be tempted off the path.

The same thing is true for some writers of stories. They are drawn to a particular atmosphere, a particular kind of landscape; they want to wander about in it and relish its special tastes and sounds, even before they know what story they’re going to tell.

The world of books is not a collection of random units of self-interest, but a living ecology.

A storyteller should be invisible, as far as I’m concerned; and the best way to make sure of that is to make the story itself so interesting that the teller just… disappears.

Not for nothing is his personal dæmon the raven, that picker-up of bits and pieces here and there.

can tell me something useful). So the wood, or the forest, is the sum of all possibilities, and, as I have mentioned elsewhere, I found a nicely scientific-sounding term for it in a book about elementary physics. The term is phase space.

‘Where do I put the camera?’ I think that that’s the basic storytelling question. Where do you see the scene from? What do you tell the reader about it? What’s your stance towards the characters? These