Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories

I am not a folklorist, but I am a vast consumer folklore--an end user, if you like. I think about folklore in the same way that a carpenter thinks about trees, although a good carpenter works with the grain the wood and should endeavour to make a table that will leave the tree glad that it became timber. I am an author. I am, by the crude yardstick sales, an immensely successful one. I'm quite happy with that yardstick. The author's prime task is to be read. The book in question may have many fine qualities, but if it cannot persuade the reader to read past page one they are going to go unnoticed. The story cannot exist in one mind alone, otherwise it's just a very complex dream. It has to be told. In fact, it is truer to say that I am a journalist by inclination and training. A proper journalist, I may add, who was taught by men who knew their craft and can still recall his shorthand when the need arises. This is in contrast to the other sort, who go straight from university into a column on an upmarket daily, one those with a little picture them at the top, where they can primp and posture in their little play street without being knocked down by real life. It sounds like the Victorian era when I talk about it now, but I was an indentured apprentice and I was in there at the death hot metal and I still think that a Linotype machine is a more amazing creation than a computer. I know a number authors who trained as journalists first. It can mess up your style, we've agreed, but it does give you a tendency to turn in things on time, check your spelling and remember above all that writing is a collaborative process to which the reader also brings something. It is particularly good training for a genre author. It's quite hard to explain the difference between a genre author and, well, a normal one, especially if you take the view that there are rather more genres around than serious literary editors would care to admit. But the collaborative aspect is prominent; those sitting in the circle firelight while the story is told are not passive listeners, but believe they have some rights in the story and that the story itself is a window into another world with a quasi-existence its own. Kill off a popular character or make one behave against what the reader considers is their nature, and you get Letters from Fans. Genre editors often acquire fans, a word deriving from fanaticus, meaning of or belonging to the temple, although I'm grateful to the Oxford English Dictionary for adding that it refers to a possessor excessive and mistaken enthusiasm. There was also a reference in my Latin dictionary to orgiastic rites. These have not so far been part my experience, although some younger fans have occasionally persuaded their mothers to send me a slice their birthday cake. I think I write fantasy. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then you might as well stick an orange in its bottom and eat it with green peas. Most my books, some twenty-four in fact, are set in the world Discworld. I say largely imaginary because course it has that slight air solidarity that mythology brings to an image; the idea that the world goes through space on the back the turtle, as the Discworld does, is found in many cultures. It is either very old indeed or we just naturally have a turtle-shaped hole in our consciousness. It's most developed in Hindu mythology; I don't recall ever learning about it, it being one those things you grow up knowing without any apparent source, but it's an image that often appears in books popular astronomy and I suppose I must have got it from one them when I was a child. Some years ago, when Salman Rushdie was having his bit trouble with the Ayatollah, a large Indian family turned up at a book signing mine in Wolverhampton. Did I know, the mother asked, that the world turtle is part Hindu mythology

Aesthetics · Art · Craft · Folklore · Folkloristics · Impromptu · Literature · Visual arts · Computer Science · History · Themes in Literature Analysis

• The End of The Eyre Affair

  Open Access•Erica Hateley•The Journal of Popular Culture•2005

  Add to list

• Topics, Notes and Comments

  Niall Finneran•Folklore•2003

  Add to list

• Sternberg, the Second Folklorist

  Jonathan Roper•Folklore•2014

  Add to list