From the category archives:

Storytelling

Beginning again

February 19, 2009

Philip Pullman tells a nice story about how he invented dæmons for use in His Dark Materials. I like Pullman’s implication that he isn’t really the author of this story – that the details were something for him to realise rather than invent.

The real story

February 12, 2009

My wife and I share a conflict of opinion about Doctor Who. She doesn’t like it, because in every episode the monsters nearly kill the humans but they get away in the end. I like it, because in spite of that it tells me a believable story about a lonely man. Which of us is right?

Origins and destinations

February 5, 2009

I believe that at the heart of storytelling lie two questions: where do we come from, and where are we going?

The true meaning of Christmas

December 16, 2008

My first Christmas story, ‘A Christmas Argument’, is now available, complete with some beautiful illustrations from my good friends.

Lions and tigers

December 3, 2008

Children’s books about lions and tigers rarely present such creatures as they really are: ruthless, powerful hunters. Instead, authors emphasise qualities such as their beauty and majesty, presenting them as objects of awe or affection in stories that are fundamentally about humans, not animals. I wanted to explore the specific kind of suspension of disbelief such tales require.

Alternative versions

November 13, 2008

Many of my own stories are, in a sense, alternative versions of existing tales. ‘A Cadence’ and the stories that follow it (‘A Fantasy’, ‘A Substitute’ and ‘A Tragedy’) are all based, to differing extents, on stories or story functions already known to me. They also contain my own inventions, elements of autobiography and even traces of public affairs. So I’ve rewritten the stories I know, or repurposed them.

Scenes from ‘A Cadence’

November 5, 2008

Here’s a series of pictures showing scenes from my story, ‘A Cadence’. Some of my friends did this as a surprise, and I’m excited not only because they’ve so successfully visualised my story in a way I never could, but also because the whole project ties in with all my recent ideas about ordinary people performing.

Five functions of fantasy

September 17, 2008

I recently mentioned escapism as one of the possible functions of fantasy, and have been meaning for some time to elaborate on this by outlining its other functions, as I see them. These functions are not necessarily mutually exclusive – a fantasy can perform more than one function at the same time. It might even [...]

Intrusive narrators

August 27, 2008

I love intrusive narrators. The more garrulous, interfering, self-conscious, the better. Intrusive narrators remind us that someone is telling this story, that the story does not exist without the telling.  It’s like the classic distinction between ’showing’ and ‘telling’ in narrative. The narrator who shows is invisible, letting his characters speak for themselves. Conversely, for [...]

The sheep-lion

August 20, 2008

Recently Bridget McNulty – an author whose blog I like – decided to re-tell ‘The Tale of the Sheep-Lion‘, a story I don’t remember hearing before, but which seems to be quite well-known.  Other tellings can be found here and here. Everyone agrees on the basic elements of this story: a lion cub is separated [...]

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