Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling

‘the great democracy of reading and writing’),

by expecting to get paid properly for the work we do, we’re helping our fellow writers in their subsequent dealings with schools, or festivals, or prisons, or whatever. I feel not a flicker of shame about declaring that I want as much money for my work as I can get. But, of course, what that money is buying, what it’s for, is security, and space, a

Each novel or story is a path (because it’s linear, because it begins on page one and goes on steadily through all the pages in the usual order until it gets to the end) that goes through a wood. The wood is the world in which the characters live and have their being; it’s the realm of all the things that could possibly happen to them; it’s the not

Words change, they have a history as well as a contemporary meaning; it’s worth knowing those things.

young novelists are often anxious about choosing the best time position for the camera, so they stick to the present tense, which seems to be safe. Unfortunately, what it conveys more often than not is a nervous self-consciousness.

I don’t know what my theme is until the story is already well under way.

the children were gazing, not at the storyteller, but at the story she was telling. The teller had become invisible, and the story worked much more effectively as a result.

SOMETIMES, BY CHANCE OR FATE OR THE WORKINGS OF AN INSCRUTABLE Providence, we meet exactly the right work of art at exactly the right time to have the maximum impact on us.

But the stories that both religion and science tell us about our origins don’t do that. There isn’t that sense of cadence and finality that we have at the end of a play or novel, or the aesthetic and moral closure we feel at the end of one of the classic fairy tales. Stories about origins don’t have that sort of determined ending.