Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling

it’s full of charm and strangeness. It’s non-linear. It just grew. The path, on the other hand, is a structure. And it has a function: it leads from here to there, or from A to B.

So we have a protective responsibility: the role of a guardian, almost a parent.

You often need more than one person in a scene to make it work.

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

The oral traditions of storytelling once seemed to be on the verge of dying out, but they didn’t die; they’re being kept alive by new generations of storytellers.

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.

Stories are not only a sequence of things that happen, they are also – or they can be – patterns as well. The shape of the story-line can weave in and out in a shape which is attractive in an abstract way, which is aesthetically pleasing no matter what it means.

But something happens to them as they grow up; they become aware of the difference between what they can do and what accomplished artists can do; they realise that their pictures look clumsy, ill-coordinated, naïve, in a word childish; and they lose the confidence to work as freely as they used to. A sort of cramp seizes their hands. They say, ‘Oh,

We should try always to use language to illuminate, reveal and clarify rather than obscure, mislead and conceal. The language should be safe in our hands