The curious incident of the dwarf, a rubber band and your best mate in the night time

So what is storytelling? On the face of it, it's everything between the two covers of a book. Anything outside of those pages comes under another some other jurisdiction. The suburbs around it, we might call Promotion, for want of a better name. Everything beyond that, is just Life, Non-Fiction, The World, call it what you will. At the very least though, we're positive that the blurb on the back of a book that sucks you right into the story is definitely not part of storytelling. Nor is it when you write a synopsis; or put into practice that ten second elevator pitch; or when someone is telling you I just bumped into that old friend of yours in Sainsbury's, you know the one you thought was dead - I'll tell you all about it later. All that, we would call promotion again, and promotion, as all respected authorities will tell you, is Wrong. It is the opposite of storytelling. Not keeping it real.

Except...

You meet your friend at the pub. Have you heard, X says, almost bursting, what just happened to Y? Well you know what Y is like, don't you? That thing he has about dwarves? Well I heard the other day that...

None of this is the story yet, of course - this is all promotion. A serious, out-and-out reader would be paying no attention. But in truth you only came to this pub in the first place because you heard someone whisper something about Y and dwarves and rubber bands, and a prurient streak in you wanted to know more. That too is Promotion, and that too is Wrong. You wouldn't ordinarily care about the problems of dwarves and rubber bands at all, but in this case it has intersected with your world. Y is actually someone you know, so suddenly the story is relevant and universal, and as for the rubber bands, well there but for the grace of god - the rubber band issue is something quite personal to you too, though heaven help you if anyone finds out about that. This story you're going to hear is something more in the context - not just about some dwarf with a rubber band - who would care about that? Now it's a story about a dwarf with a rubber band and already, it connects with your life. Because the thing about the dwarf incident is this - you would never have made such an embarrasing mistake in the dark, would you? Almost certainly not. Probably not. Although perhaps you might. And it might have had unwound for you the same disastrous way, that really wouldn't bear thinking about. And anything that doesn't bear thinking about, pretty much gets itself thought about. Boy, you're stuck in a web of story now.

Sometimes I wonder why I post illustrations here of the events in my novel. Why I write my blog at all. And then I think, oh yeah - it's storytelling, isn't it? It begins here, and carries on to the last page. And if it really, really works - it keeps going...