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.

No one had told such people that poetry is in fact enchantment; that it has the form it does because that very form casts a spell; and that when they thought they were bothered and bewildered, they were in fact being bewitched, and if they let themselves accept the enchantment and enjoy it, they would eventually understand much more about the poem.

‘the great democracy of reading and writing’),

The world or the wood can be as detailed and rich as we like. But the path, which is Cinderella’s own story, goes from here to there, going through this part and that part. Always. And the business of the storyteller, or the novelist, it seems to me, is with the path and not the wood.

The only problem is how to get from one universe to another. In a sense, this is a basic problem of science fiction: how to get from here, where we live, to there, where the strange things happen.

But you do make choices. You can’t help it. That’s the way narrative works. You privilege this over that by the mere fact of focusing on it.

‘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

I’m just going to say that we should all insist that we’re properly paid for what we do. We should sell our work for as much as we can decently get for it, and we shouldn’t be embarrassed about it.

we have to pay attention to what our imagination feels comfortable doing.