Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling

You can also see what they do, of course, but that doesn’t come in the form of words—it comes in the form of pictures, and you have to find the words, and that’s not so easy.

Once you’ve got the characters established in your mind you can hear what they say to each other quite easily. And because they give you the words, you can write them down.

Another aspect of the “Where do I put the camera?” question is that of the narrator. Who is telling the story? Whose words do we read? Whose voice do we hear?

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?

Raymond Chandler knew what he was talking about when he said, “When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” The man with the gun might be anything—a postman with an important letter, a phone call asking the protagonist to contact her lawyer immediately, or, as here, an aspect of the protagonist’s own character; the essential thing is that you, the storyteller, didn’t know about it in advance. You didn’t plan it. It takes you by surprise, and opens up new possibilities, and forces you to come up with solutions you wouldn’t have had to think of otherwise.

Alfred Hitchcock said something interesting about this: he pointed out that if a film begins by following a burglar into an empty house, and watching him ransack the drawers, then when the lights of the owner’s car show up outside the window, we think: hurry up! They’re coming! We don’t want them to catch him. We’re on his side, because we started with him. I wanted the readers on Lyra’s side from the start.

G. K. Chesterton was thinking about this distinction when he said that literature was a luxury, but fiction was a necessity.

fabula and sjuzhet

ut should we only tell stories that reflect our own background? Should we refrain from telling stories that originated elsewhere, on the grounds that we don’t have the right to annex the experience of others? Absolutely not. A culture that never encounters any others becomes first inward-looking, and then stagnant, and then rotten. We are responsible—there’s that word again—for bringing fresh streams of story into our own cultures from all over the world, and welcoming experience from every quarter, and offering our own experience in return.

We should try always to use language to illuminate, reveal and clarify rather than obscure, mislead and conceal.