Stories: All-New Tales

I pondered for a bit. I’d said a lot about books and kids’ reading over the years, and other people had said things pithier and wiser than I ever could. And then it hit me, and this is what I wrote:

I’m not sure I’d put a quote up, if it was me, and I had a library wall to deface. I think I’d just remind people of the power of stories, of why they exist in the first place. I’d put up the four words that anyone telling a story wants to hear. The ones that show that it’s working, and that pages will be turned:

“…and then what happened?”

The four words that children ask, when you pause, telling them a story. The four words you hear at the end of a chapter. The four words, spoken or unspoken, that show you, as a storyteller, that people care.

The joy of fiction, for some of us, is the joy of the imagination, set free from the world and able to imagine.

Talking to Al Sarrantonio I realised that I was not alone in finding myself increasingly frustrated with the boundaries of genre: the idea that categories which existed only to guide people around bookshops now seemed to be dictating the kind of stories that were being written. I love the word fantasy, for example, but I love it for the almost infinite room it gives an author to play: an infinite playroom, of a sort, in which the only boundaries are those of the imagination. I do not love it for the idea of commercial fantasy. Commercial fantasy, for good or for ill, tends to drag itself through already existing furrows, furrows dug by J. R. R. Tolkien or Robert E. Howard, leaving a world of stories behind it, excluding so much. There was so much fine fiction, fiction allowing free reign to the imagination of the author, beyond the shelves of genre. That was what we wanted to read.

It seemed to us that the fantastic can be, can do, so much more than its detractors assume: it can illuminate the real, it can distort it, it can mask it, it can hide it. It can show you the world you know in a way that makes you realise you’ve never looked at it, not looked at it. G. K. Chesterton compared fantastic fiction to going on holiday—that the importance of your holiday is the moment you return, and you see the place you live through fresh eyes.

And so the call went out from Mr. Sarrantonio and from me, and the stories began to come back to us. Writers rose to the challenge. We learned to expect only the unexpected.

“…and then what happened?”

The real magic of this little invocation is that it has inspired hundreds of millions of words, has made people who never imagined themselves as storytellers into tale-tellers who could have given Scheherazade or Dunsany’s Joseph Jorkens a run for their money or their whiskey or their lives. We turn the page, and the adventure begins.

There is something waiting for you. So turn the page.

Neil Gaiman

December 2009

BLOOD

Roddy Doyle

HE GREW UP IN DRACULA’S CITY. He’d walked past Bram Stoker’s house every day on his way to school. But it had meant nothing to him. He’d never felt a thing, not the hand of a ghost or a shiver, not a lick on his neck as he passed. In fact, he was nearly eighteen, in his last year at school, before he’d even noticed the plaque beside the door. He’d never read the book, and probably never would. He’d fallen asleep during Coppola’s Dracula. One minute his wife was screaming, grabbing his knee; the next, she was grabbing the same knee, trying to wake him up. The cinema lights were on and she was furious.

-How can you do that?

-What?

-Sleep during a film like that.

-I always fall asleep when the film’s shite.

-We’re supposed to be out on a date.

-That’s a different point, he said.–For that, I apologise. How did it end, anyway?

-Oh, fuck off, she said, affectionately—that was possible in Dublin.

So the whole thing, the whole Dracula business, meant absolutely nothing to him.

Nevertheless, he wanted to drink blood.

Badly.

The badly was recent, and dreadful. The itch, the urge, the leaking tongue—it was absolutely dreadful.

He wasn’t sure when it had started. He was, though—he knew when he’d become aware.

-How d’you want your steak?

-Raw.

His wife had laughed. But he’d been telling her the truth. He wanted the slab of meat she was holding over the pan, raw and now—fuck the pan, it wasn’t needed. He could feel muscles holding him back, and other muscles fighting for him—neck muscles, jaw muscles.

Then he woke.

But he was awake already, still standing in the kitchen, looking at the steak, and looking forward to it.

-Rare, so, he said.

She smiled at him.

-You’re such a messer, she said.