Once More With Footnotes

things in our stories that fit. We may have begun as homo sapiens but we have become homo narrans — story -making man.
     
                  I can hardly claim ownership of narrative causality, apart from the name, because it seems to me to be a statement of the obvious. In any case, in Discworld, it is such a wonderful tool for the writer. This is how I set it out in Witches Abr oad:
     
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                  Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the ret elling ... stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.
     
                  And their existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.
     
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                  This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the o ther workings of that story that have ever been.
     
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                  This is why history keeps on repeating all the time.
     
                  So a thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods. A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed. A million un knowing actors have moved, unknowing, through the pathways of story.
     
                  It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which had so far claimed his older brothers, not to succeed.
     
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                  Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.
     
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                  I arrived here tonight by way of a bookshop signing in Worthing a couple of years ago, when I was taking the opportunity to ask readers in the queue what magpie rhymes they knew. This was by way of being a reality check. An author who is in the habit of idly referring to things t h at everyone knows, had better make sure of what everyone actually does know. I was a little depressed to find that the only one most of them knew, if they knew one at all, was the one from the children's programme "Magpie" — "One for Sorrow, Two for Joy ..." etc., which I've always thought a little insipid compared to the one I recall learning when I was a kid, "One for Sorrow, Two for Mirth, Three for a Funeral, Four for a Birth ..." Funeral and birth in consecutive lines — there's something pleasantly chilly about that.
     
                  And it turned out that Jacqueline was in the queue, and by the time I got home from that week's leg of the tour quite a few pages had come off my fax machine. And then, without quite knowing how, I was down to do this talk.
     
                  I'll finish by a dding that the reality checks I do undertake often leave me depressed at how much has been forgotten ...
     
                  A year or two ago, on a signing tour, the car happened to pass a sign to Great Dunmow. I mentioned the Flitch to the other occupants, all intelligent , apparently well-educated people, and they'd never heard of it. I found this actually difficult to take in. I'd just assumed it was part of what I think of as "white knowledge", things that you never actually learn but which get insinuated into your brai n by some kind of semi-genetic process. But my mail sometimes make me feel that I'm on a different planet, which I am to some extent, but I pride myself of having a strong attachment to this one.
     
                  I recall one email from someone in their late teens asking: "how did you come up with the idea of three witches and making one a crabby old lady, one a motherly type, and one very young and silly?" and I thought: How do I begin to explain? Maybe I should send him a reading list? I run across practising pagans who haven't heard of Graves' The White Goddess, and young adults who, although having apparently had some kind of re ligious