Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling

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.

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

But if we find we can make money by writing books, by telling stories, we have the responsibility – the responsibility to our families, and those we look after – of doing it as well and as profitably as we can.

playwright David Mamet said something very interesting. He said that the basic storytelling question is: ‘Where do I put the camera?’ Thinking about that fascinating, that fathomlessly interesting, question is part of our responsibility towards the craft. Taking cinematography as a metaphor for storytelling, and realising that around every subject

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.

Easy cynicism is no more truthful than easy optimism, though it seems to be so to the young.

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.

Some of the most interesting discussion about story and how it works (and remember, I’m talking practical hands-on stuff here) has come from the makers of films.

‘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