Goya- with Sheraz Ali and Danny Wallace

Getting Emotional

A great story gets into your head; niggles its way into your mind, and makes you feel like you actually lived in it. When you close the book, turn off the TV or leave the cinema, those characters, for a split-second, still hang out in your head. The thing you're feeling is goya- the suspension of disbelief caused by such good and immersive storytelling.

In this episode we get to the origin of the word- it comes from Urdu, and seems to have been re-translated a few times over to get to where it is today. Sheraz Ali, an Urdu teacher at Manchester University, answers some of my questions about where it's come from. (I didn't have time to include all the beautiful Urdu poetry he read to me, but I'm so grateful he helped me understand the wider context of this word.)

Then we chat to writer and broadcaster Danny Wallace, who lets me take a deep-dive into his world of storytelling. How does he create a sense of goya for his readers? Is it easier to provide it in books rather than any other media? What work inspired him? He very kindly gives some in-depth answers that reveal his own formula for story success. Well, it's an emotion about writing, so it makes sense to talk to an actual author, right?

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