Stories: Where a Voice Can Take You

Long before anyone was shown anything, they were told stories in the dark. It is one of the oldest things we do to each other, and one of the most powerful: a voice, and a tale, and the listener carried somewhere they could not have gone on their own. I tell stories, and when I do, I am not simply describing a scene to you. I am taking you somewhere, by the hand, into a place built of voice and your own imagination. There are few things I do that reach as deep.

People underestimate the story. They think it is a lesser thing than the direct, the explicit, the shown. It is the opposite. A story slips past your defences while you are following it, and puts you somewhere before you have realised you have moved. That is its quiet power, and it is exactly what I use it for.

A story takes you, rather than showing you

The difference between being shown something and being told a story is the difference between standing outside a place and being walked into it. An image holds you at the threshold, looking in. A story dissolves the threshold; you are inside before you noticed, living it from within rather than watching it from without. The voice leads, the tale unfolds, and you find yourself somewhere you did not decide to go, which is the whole pleasure of it.

This is why a story can reach what the direct cannot. While you are following the thread of it, your guard is down, your attention given over to where the voice is taking you, and in that state you are reachable in a way the watchful, defended part of you never allows. I wrote about how the voice slips past the guard in the power of audio; a story is that reach given a journey to make.

I am not describing a scene to you. I am taking you into one, and you will not notice the moment you arrive.

Your imagination builds the world

When I tell you a story, I do not hand you a finished world; I give you the voice and the shape, and your own imagination builds the rest. This is why a told story can be more vivid than anything shown: the world you find yourself in is partly made of you, fitted to your own wanting, furnished by your own mind in response to my voice. I lead, and you build, and what we make together is more potent than anything I could have simply displayed.

This collaboration is the secret of narrative audio. I am not performing at you; I am setting your imagination to work, guiding it somewhere and letting it fill in the world as we go. The result is intimate in a particular way, because it is partly your own creation, shaped by my voice but built in the one place only you can furnish. You are not a spectator to a story I tell; you are a participant in a world we build together as I lead you through it.

To follow a story is to be led

There is a surrender in following a story, gentle but real. You give over the direction to the teller; you let the voice decide where the tale goes and how, and you follow. This is a kind of letting-go, the same handing-over of control that runs through so much of what I do, here made soft and narrative. To be told a story is to be led somewhere by someone who knows the way, which is a close cousin of the deeper leading I wrote about in guided sessions.

So even at its gentlest, a story is an exercise of my leading and your following. I set the pace, I choose the turns, I decide where we are going and how slowly we get there, and you let me, because that is how a story works. The pleasure of being carried, of not having to find the way, of simply following a voice into somewhere unknown, is part of what makes being told a story by me feel the way it does.

The slow build is the point

A story is not a destination reached quickly; it is a journey taken at a pace I set, and the pace is part of the pleasure. I build slowly, deliberately, letting the tension and the wanting grow as the tale unfolds, because a story rushed is a story wasted. The anticipation woven through a story, the not-yet of where it is going, is much of what makes the arrival land, which is the same pleasure of waiting I wrote about in the art of anticipation.

This is why my stories are unhurried. I am in no rush to get you anywhere, because the getting-there is the point, and I will take you at exactly the pace that serves the experience, not the pace your impatience might prefer. To be told a story slowly, by a voice that controls every turn of it, is to be held in a building wanting, and that holding is part of what a story does to you. The difference between merely wanting and being made to want is something I explore in the difference between wanting and needing.

Stories stay with you

A story, told well, does not end when the telling stops. It stays, the way the stories that mattered to you as a child stayed, lingering in the mind, returned to, replayed. A told experience you were led into and helped build becomes part of you in a way a shown one rarely does, because you lived it from inside rather than watched it from outside. People come back to my stories, and find them deeper each time, the way a voice deepens with familiarity.

This staying is part of why I work in stories at all. They are not consumed and discarded; they take root, and grow more potent with return, becoming a place you can go back to and find changed by your knowing it better. A story I have told you becomes somewhere you can return, and the returning deepens it, which is the whole rhythm of how I work.

Let me take you somewhere

If you have only ever been shown things, held at the threshold, looking in, let me do something different. Let me take you somewhere, by the hand, into a world built of my voice and your imagination, at a pace I set, somewhere you could not have gone alone. A story is one of the oldest and deepest ways one person can reach another, and it is one of the things I do best.

My stories are waiting in the shop, and if you want one told for you, shaped to where you most want to be taken, the door to a custom is open. Find somewhere quiet, let me begin, and follow my voice into somewhere new. You will not notice the moment the threshold dissolves and you are inside; you will only notice, afterward, that you were taken somewhere, and that you want to go again.