The Mystery Feast by Ben Okri

Author:Ben Okri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Clairview Books Ltd
Published: 2015-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Notes to a modern storyteller

1

The most sensational stories are not necessarily the ones that endure.

2

The stories that last are the ones most cunningly, most mysteriously, told.

3

The greatness of a story is more in the telling than in the tale. The true art resides in the nature of the telling, the way the story is freighted to the imagination. There are more sensational stories than the Odyssey, but few as enigmatically told.

4

Our age is lost in sensational tales. Without genuine mystery, the mystery of art, a story will not linger in the imagination.

5

A fragment is more fascinating than the whole.

6

The mind likes completion. If you give the mind complete stories you give it nothing to do. The Trojan war lasted twenty years. But Homer tells only of one year, one quarrel, one rage. Yet has a war haunted us more? It is the war story to which others return, as to a source.

7

Indirection fascinates. Straight roads make the mind fall asleep. But we all love to take hidden paths, roads that bend and curve. The Renaissance artists understood the appeal of paths that wander out of view. We want to travel the untravelled road. We should learn to tell untold stories; stories that wander off the high road; stories like roads untaken. This is the only cure for the despair that all the stories have been told, that there are no new stories under the sun. All the high road stories have been told, but not the hidden roads stories that lead to the true centre.

8

Direct things bore us. Indirect things awaken us. Indirection wakens us to the wonder of the world. Poetry is restored to the world through suggestiveness. Indirect stories stimulate the imagination. Indirect writing multiplies reality.

9

The way a story is told affects the reality of the story. A story is altered by its telling, its slant, its accent, its angle. The mode of telling is a portal. A new portal makes a new story.

10

A story exists in language, but lives in the imagination, in the memory. When does a story live? It lives only when it is read or heard. A story is part telling, part hearing. Part writing, part reading. It dwells in the ambiguous place between the teller and the hearer, between the writer and the reader. The greatest storytellers understand this magical fact, and use the magic of the in-between in their stories and in their telling.

11

A story is a spirit essence. It wanders the ether till an open heart, a receptive mind, gives it habitation.

12

A story is not a thing. It is a perpetual potentiality. An endlessly coiled energy. It sleeps in its Elysium till it is brought into the realm of human beings.

13

Stories are the purest form of self revealing. Every story you write or tell reveals you. It is impossible to conceal yourself in your stories. More revealing than the face, are the stories you tell. A story is the most self-betraying act we engage in. We are never more naked than in our stories.

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