My family background was Welsh, and the Welsh are very,very fond of storytelling and tend to be rather good at it. They're also fond of children, but they are not in the modern way infinitely tolerant of children. They think children need to be taught and they teach them. They teach them very often through stories. I feel that this quality of storytelling is basic to the novelist's art.
Sometimes I am asked to talk to groups of students about writing, and the poor souls are filled to the brim with all the complex business about theories and types of narrative and this, that and the other. What I say to them is
If you're a writer, a real writer, you're a descendant of those medieval storytellers who used to go into the square of a town and spread a little mat on the ground and sit on it and beat on a bowl and say,
"If you give a copper coin I will tell you a golden tale"
If the storyteller had what it took, he collected a little group and told them a golden tale until it got to the most exciting point and then he passed the bowl again. That was the way he made his living, and if he failed to hold his audience, he was through and had to take up some other line of work.
Now this is what a writer must do. I get so sick of writers who make tedious demands on their readers and expect them to bear with them through infinitely refined analyses of meaning and this,that and the other.
You really must have a story and you must tell it, or people will just put the book down and they will find it to be one of those books (unlike the ones you sometimes read about in book reviews) that once put down is impossible to take up again.
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