Daemon Voices E-Book

Philip Pullman

• Herausgeber: David Fickling Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 762

Beschreibung

Warm, entertaining, and above all thought-provoking, Daemon Voices provides a remarkable insight into the mind of one of our greatest writers. He explains which storytellers have meant the most to him, including William Blake and John Milton, why their work has resonated with him, and how it has inspired his own thinking.In over 30 essays, written over 20 years, Philip Pullman reveals the narratives that have shaped his vision, his experience of writing, and the keys to mastering the art of storytelling.

Leseprobe

DÆMON VOICES

www.davidficklingbooks.com

Dæmon Voices

IN OVER THIRTY ESSAYS, written over twenty years, one of the world’s great storytellers meditates on storytelling. Warm, funny, generous, entertaining and, above all, deeply considered, they offer thoughts on a wide variety of topics, including the origin and composition of Philip Pullman’s own stories, the craft of writing and the storytellers who have meant the most to him.

The art of storytelling is everywhere present in the essays themselves, in the instantly engaging tone, the vivid imagery and striking phrases, the resonant anecdotes, the humour and learnedness. Together, they are greater than the sum of their parts: a single, sustained engagement with story and storytelling.

Selected Works by Philip Pullman

The Book of Dust trilogy

La Belle Sauvage

His Dark Materials trilogy

Northern LightsThe Subtle KnifeThe Amber Spyglass

His Dark Materials companion books

Lyra’s OxfordOnce Upon a Time in the North

The Sally Lockhart quartet

The Ruby in the SmokeThe Shadow in the NorthThe Tiger in the WellThe Tin Princess

Other books

The Haunted Storm

Galatea

Count Karlstein

How to be Cool

Spring-Heeled Jack

The Broken Bridge

The Wonderful Story of Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp

Clockwork, or, All Wound Up

The Firework-Maker’s Daughter

Mossycoat

The Butterfly Tattoo

I was a Rat! or The Scarlet Slippers

Puss in Boots: The Adventures of That Most Enterprising Feline

The Scarecrow and his Servant

The Adventures of the New Cut Gang

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Grimm Tales: For Young and Old

Graphic novels

Count KarlsteinThe Adventures of John Blake

To Michael and Clare

Contents

Topic Finder

Introduction

By Simon Mason

Magic Carpets

The Writer’s Responsibilities

The Writing of Stories

Making It Up and Writing It Down

Heinrich von Kleist: On the Marionette Theatre

Grace Lost and Regained

Paradise Lost

An Introduction

The Origin of the Universe

The Storytelling of Science and Religion: A Response to a Lecture by Stephen Hawking

The Path through the Wood

How Stories Work

Dreaming of Spires

Oxfords, Real and Imaginary

Intention

What Do You Mean?

Children’s Literature Without Borders

Stories Shouldn’t Need Passports

Let’s Write it in Red

The Practice of Writing

Epics

Big Stories about Big Things

Folk Tales of Britain

Streams of Stories Down Through the Years

As Clear as Water

Making a New Version of the Brothers Grimm

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

Modernism and Storytelling

Poco a Poco

The Fundamental Particles of Narrative

The Classical Tone

Narrative Tact and other Classical Virtues

Reading in the Borderland

Reading, Books and Pictures

Oliver Twist

An Introduction

Let’s Pretend

Novels, Films and the Theatre

The Firework-Maker’s Daughter on Stage

The Story of a Story

Imaginary Friends

Are Stories Anti-scientific?

Maus

Behind the Masks

Balloon Debate

Why Fiction is Valuable

The Anatomy of Melancholy

An Introduction to an Indispensable Book

Soft Beulah’s Night

William Blake and Vision

Writing Fantasy Realistically

Fantasy, Realism and Faith

The Story of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

A Response to Puzzled Readers

The Cat, the Chisel and the Grave

Do We Need a Theory of Human Nature to Tell Us How to Write Stories?

‘I Must Create a System… ’

A Moth’s-eye View of William Blake

Talents and Virtues

Another Visit to Miss Goddard’s Grave

God and Dust

Notes for a Study Day with the Bishop of Oxford

The Republic of Heaven

God is Dead, Long Live the Republic!

About the Author and Editor

Acknowledgements

Permissions

Index

Colour Section

Topic Finder

Certain themes recur in more than one essay. The lists below identify some of those themes and group together the essays in which they are discussed.

On Children’s Literature

Imaginary Friends

Intention

Children’s Literature Without Borders

On Education and Story

Let’s Write it in Red

Talents and Virtues

Paradise Lost

On Folk Tales, Fairy Tales and Epics

Epics

Folk Tales of Britain

As Clear as Water

Imaginary Friends

Magic Carpets

The Classical Tone

On His Dark Materials

Dreaming of Spires

God and Dust

Heinrich von Kleist: On the Marionette Theatre

Reading in the Borderland

The Path through the Wood

The Writing of Stories

On My Other Books

As Clear as Water

Intention (The Scarecrow and His Servant)

Poco a Poco (Clockwork and I Was A Rat!)

The Firework-Maker’s Daughter on Stage

The Path Through the Wood (I Was a Rat!)

The Story of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

On Other Media: Film, TV and the Theatre

Let’s Pretend

Let’s Write it in Red

Magic Carpets

Oliver Twist

The Writing of Stories

The Firework-Maker’s Daughter on Stage

On Pictures

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

Maus

Oliver Twist

Poco a Poco

Reading in the Borderland

On Reading

Balloon Debate

God and Dust

Talents and Virtues

Reading in the Borderland

The Anatomy of Melancholy

Children’s Literature Without Borders

On Religion and Story

God and Dust

‘I Must Create a System…’

Talents and Virtues

Paradise Lost

The Origin of the Universe

The Republic of Heaven

The Story of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

The Writing of Stories

On Science and Story

‘I Must Create a System…’

Let’s Write it in Red

Poco a Poco

The Origin of the Universe

The Path through the Wood

The Writing of Stories

On Story in Culture

Balloon Debate

Imaginary Friends

Magic Carpets

Talents and Virtues

The Republic of Heaven

On Other Writers’ Stories

As Clear as Water

Heinrich von Kleist: On the Marionette Theatre

‘I Must Create a System’

Maus

Oliver Twist

Paradise Lost

The Anatomy of Melancholy

The Classical Tone

Soft Beulah’s Night

On the Writer

‘I Must Create a System…’

Let’s Write it in Red

Magic Carpets

Talents and Virtues

Poco a Poco

The Cat, the Chisel and the Grave

Writing Fantasy Realistically

On the Practice of Writing

God and Dust

‘I Must Create a System…’

Intention

Let’s Write it in Red

Magic Carpets

Oliver Twist

Poco a Poco

The Cat, the Chisel and the Grave

The Classical Tone

The Path through the Wood

The Writing of Stories

Introduction

AS THE AUTHOR OF SOME OF THE MOST POPULAR STORIES OF OUR TIME, Philip Pullman requires very little introduction; his books have been read by millions of eager readers the world over, not only the trilogy of His Dark Materials, but also the Sally Lockhart novels, his fairy tales, his retelling of Grimm’s folk tales, the fable The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, and many others. He is recognised as one of the world’s great storytellers.

During my work on his essays, we met several times, usually at his home. In person he is a striking presence, physically imposing but quiet in his manner. He typically dresses in casual, practical clothes with plenty of pockets that give him the air of a craftsman, an electrician perhaps, or a carpenter – which, in fact, he is. When we began our meetings he still had his famous ponytail, which he had vowed to keep until finishing the first volume of The Book of Dust. He reported that The Bookseller had said it made him look like a retired roadie. The ponytail came off a few months later, and he showed it to me in a transparent bag. ‘I’m thinking of donating it to the Bodleian Library,’ he said.

Humorous, formidably knowledgeable, sharply intelligent and firm in his opinions, he has absolutely no airs and graces, instinctively putting people at their ease. Each time I met him I was struck by his relaxed courtesy. (I was struck in a different way by his pair of hyperactive cockapoo puppies – Mixie and Coco – who flew at me from all angles, even, somehow, from above, while Philip calmly made coffee in the kitchen.) The low-ceilinged, open-fired room where we talked was filled with objects – musical instruments, pictures, books and wooden constructions, which he had made himself. The pleasure he takes in the well-made is evident, and I was often shown things he liked: a Doves Press edition of Paradise Lost printed with the famous Doves type; a woodcut by John Lawrence; a life-size alethiometer made for him by an admiring reader. He nearly always had a story to tell about these objects. The Doves type, he told me, was once destroyed by their co-owner T. J. Cobden-Sanderson after a dispute with his business partner Emory Walker, by casting it, bit by bit, into the Thames from Hammersmith Bridge, a process which he undertook only on dark nights, and which took him five months to complete, beginning at the end of August 1916 and finishing in January 1917. (Nearly a hundred years later, it was retrieved by the Port of London Authority’s Salvage diving team employed by a designer wishing to digitise the type.)

This instinct to tell stories is deep in Philip. For sheer storytelling excitement, his own stories are hard to beat. But their popularity is due also, I think, to their thoughtfulness, the way in which, with great curiosity and energy, they engage ideas and issues and ask interesting questions. Is the world conscious? What is our place and purpose here? What is evil? Where does religious belief come from? Can innocence be regained? His stories dramatise such questions in thrilling ways. And so do his essays.

The thirty-two here, selected from more than 120, were written over many years. The oldest is ‘Let’s Write it in Red’, a fascinating – and fascinated – meditation on story writing considered as a game, dating from June 1997. The most recent is ‘Soft Beulah’s Night’, from November 2014, an impassioned personal testament to the wisdom and originality of the poet William Blake who, arguably, has influenced Philip the most.

The essays are also very varied. Partly, this is because they were written in different circumstances, for different purposes: many were talks, delivered at conferences or symposia; others were articles in newspapers; yet others were commissioned pieces in journals, chapters in books, programme notes and promotional pieces. Mainly, though, it is because Philip’s interests range so widely. Not for nothing is his personal dæmon the raven, that picker-up of bits and pieces here and there. Like most great writers, he is a great reader, and thinks about what he has picked up during a lifetime of passionate, engaged reading of the work of physicists, literary theorists, historians, film-makers, theologians, art historians, novelists and poets.

He is interested in the discoveries of science, (‘intellectual daring and imaginative brilliance without parallel’), the freedoms of democracy (in particular ‘the great democracy of reading and writing’), the evils of authoritarianism (‘always reductive whether it’s in power or not’) and the pitfalls of education (‘any education that neglects the experience of delight will be a dry and tasteless diet with no nourishment in it’). He is profoundly interested in religion, while remaining puzzled by aspects of it. ‘The first thing to say about the Bishop’s arguments in his book,’ he writes in ‘God and Dust’, ‘is that I agree with every word of them, except the words I don’t understand; and that the words I don’t understand are those such as spirit, spiritual and God.’

He is interested, above all, in human nature, how we live and love and fight and betray and console one another. How we explain ourselves to ourselves.

So there is great variety here. But all the essays relate, deliberately, to a single theme. Storytelling. It is what he knows best. His own stories, and his experience of writing them. Other people’s stories, and his passionate appreciation of them. The techniques of writing stories. The pleasures of reading stories. The importance of stories in our culture.

To pick a few examples, at random. In ‘Magic Carpets’ he writes about the responsibilities of the storyteller – to his audience, to language, to his story and – not the least important thing – to his family’s finances. In ‘The Writing of Stories’ he shares his thoughts on technical issues: tenses, perspective and other aspects of narration. In ‘Oliver Twist’ and ‘Paradise Lost’ he celebrates a few of the authors and books he particularly loves. In ‘God and Dust’ he writes about story and religion; and in ‘The Origin of the Universe’ about story and science. In ‘Folk Tales of Britain’ and ‘As Clear as Water’ he explains why he so loves the swift, clean tone of the oldest forms of storytelling. And in numerous essays he generously writes about his own work, including (in ‘The Writing of Stories’) his composition of the opening passages of Northern Lights, and (in ‘The Path Through the Wood’), the thinking that led to the idea of the extraordinary wheeled creatures called mulefa who appear in The Amber Spyglass. ‘Around this time,’ he writes, ‘my son Tom and I spent a morning walking around Lake Bled, in Slovenia, talking about the problem…’ He has turned his account into a story, and it is all the more interesting for it.

Though they often deal with abstruse ideas, the essays are never in the least obscure; Philip’s storytelling (‘I realised some time ago that I belong at the vulgar end of the literary spectrum,’ he remarks) is evident in the instantly engaging tone, the vivid imagery and striking phrases, the resonant anecdotes.

It is striking, though not surprising, how well the essays cohere, despite their diverse origins. As in a conversation, a favourite topic is explored in different ways, from different angles, raised in one essay, scrutinised at greater length in another, re-examined in a third, developed in a new context in a fourth, and transformed in a fifth. I think it is possible to read them, in fact, as a single, sustained engagement with story and storytelling by a great storyteller and, to my mind, the book takes its place naturally among Philip’s others. I hope that it will give his readers the same excitement that it has given me in bringing them together.

I should say a word about the methodology of gathering and ordering them. As I mentioned, they were written over the years, for various purposes. Many were talks, delivered at a specific moment in time, at a particular place. Slight tweaks have been made here and there to eliminate instances of unnecessary outdatedness. A bigger issue was the occurrence of repetitions, as Philip returned over and again to favourite topics. Tweaks have been made here too – though not too many. As I say, I felt that the return – the re-examination and development – of these ideas and themes are an important part of the overall story. Although Philip returns several times to, say, the gnostic myth or Kleist’s essay ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, I have preserved these passages as much as possible, cutting out only word-for-word duplications.

The sense of an overall story also directed my ordering of the essays. I could have arranged them chronologically or thematically, but I found the former unenlightening and the latter too clunky. I toyed for a while with the idea of a random arrangement, but randomness can be dull and awkward as well as serendipitous, and in practice I doubted it would end up random at all. I opted for something else: a loose arrangement along a thread of connections and correspondences, which begins with the figure of the storyteller, proceeds through many different explorations of the writing of stories, broadens to take in the pleasures, purpose and nature of reading stories, and ends with a deeply felt statement of belief in the power and centrality of stories in our culture. If readers want to read the collection from the beginning, I hope they will find pleasure and interest in this order. But it is not intended to limit readers, who are of course free to dip in and out as they wish, find a congenial subject in the topic finder, or just choose an essay at random. After all, as Philip says, free and democratic reading is a vital part of the Republic of Heaven, and delight always an aspect of storytelling.

Simon Mason

Oxford, March 2017

Magic Carpets

THE WRITER’S RESPONSIBILITIES

On the various sorts of responsibility incumbent on an author: to himself and his family, to language, to his audience, to truth, and to his story itself

THANK YOU FOR INVITING ME TO TALK TO THIS CONFERENCE. I’VE BEEN racking my brains to think of a way of addressing your theme of magic carpets and international perspectives, because I think one should at least try, and I’ve come to the conclusion that although I’m not going to say anything directly about that, what I do have to say is as true as I can make it. I’m going to talk about responsibility.

And responsibility is a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, because it has a bearing on the way the world is going, and on whether or not our profession, our art or craft, has anything to contribute to the continual struggle to make the world a better place; or whether what we do is, in the last analysis, trivial and irrelevant. Of course, there are several views about the relationship between art and the world, with at one end of the spectrum the Soviet idea that the writer is the engineer of human souls, that art has a social function and had better damn well produce what the state needs, and at the other end the declaration of Oscar Wilde that there is no such thing as a good book or a bad book; books are well written or badly written, that is all; and all art is quite useless. However, it’s notable that the book in which he wrote those words as a preface, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is one of the most moral stories that was ever written, so even Saint Oscar admitted with part of himself that art does have a social and ethical function.

Anyway, I take it that art, literature, children’s literature, do not exist in an ivory tower; I take it that we’re inextricably part of the world, the whole world; and that we have several kinds of responsibility that follow from that.

So that’s what I’m going to talk about briefly this evening – the responsibility of the storyteller – and how far it extends, and what directions it extends in, and where it stops.

The first responsibility to talk about is a social and financial one: the sort of responsibility we share with many other citizens – the need to look after our families and those who depend on us. People of my age will probably remember that wonderfully terrifying advertisement they used to have for Pearl Assurance. It told a little story which I used to read all the way through every time I saw it. When many years later I learned the meaning of the word ‘catharsis’, I realised what it was that I’d been feeling as I read that little story: I had been purged by pity and terror.

The advertisement consisted of five drawings of a man’s face. The first was labelled ‘At age 25’, and it showed a bright-eyed, healthy, optimistic young fellow, full of pep and vigour, with a speech balloon saying ‘They tell me the job doesn’t carry a pension.’

Each succeeding drawing showed him ten years older, and the speech balloons changed with each one. At forty-five, for example, he was looking sombre and lined and heavy with responsibility, and saying ‘Unfortunately, the job is not pensionable.’ It ended with him at sixty-five: wrinkled, haggard, wild-eyed, a broken-down old man staring into the very abyss of poverty and decrepitude, and saying, ‘Without a pension I really don’t know what I shall do!’

Well, I’m not going to sell you a pension. I’m just going to say that we should all insist that we’re properly paid for what we do. We should sell our work for as much as we can decently get for it, and we shouldn’t be embarrassed about it. Some tender and sentimental people – especially young people – are rather shocked when I tell them that I write books to make money, and I want to make a lot, if I can.

When we start writing books we’re all poor; we all have to do another job in the daytime and write at night; and, frankly, it’s not as romantic as it seems to those who aren’t doing it. Worry – constant low-level unremitting anxiety about bank statements and mortgages and bills – is not a good state of mind to write in. I’ve done it. It drains your energy; it distracts you; it weakens your concentration. The only good thing about being poor and obscure is the obscurity – just as the only trouble with being rich and famous is the fame.

But if we find we can make money by writing books, by telling stories, we have the responsibility – the responsibility to our families, and those we look after – of doing it as well and as profitably as we can. Here’s a useful piece of advice to young writers: cultivate a reputation – which need have no basis in reality – but cultivate a reputation of being very fond of money. If the people you have to deal with think that you like the folding stuff a great deal, they’ll think twice before they offer you very small amounts of it. What’s more, by expecting to get paid properly for the work we do, we’re helping our fellow writers in their subsequent dealings with schools, or festivals, or prisons, or whatever. I feel not a flicker of shame about declaring that I want as much money for my work as I can get. But, of course, what that money is buying, what it’s for, is security, and space, and peace and quiet, and time.

The next responsibility I want to talk about is the writer’s, the storyteller’s, responsibility towards language. Once we become conscious of the way language works, and our relationship to it, we can’t pretend to be innocent about it; it’s not just something that happens to us, and over which we have no influence. If human beings can affect the climate, we can certainly affect the language, and those of us who use it professionally are responsible for looking after it. This is the sort of taking-care-of-the-tools that any good worker tries to instil in an apprentice – keeping the blades sharp, oiling the bearings, cleaning the filters.

I don’t have to tell any of you the importance of having a good dictionary, or preferably several. Every writer I know is fascinated by words, and developed the habit of looking things up at a very early age. Words change, they have a history as well as a contemporary meaning; it’s worth knowing those things. We should acquire as many reference books as we have space for – old and out-of-date ones as well as new ones – and make a habit of using them, and take pride in getting things right. The internet also knows a thing or two, but I still prefer books. There’s a pleasure in discharging this responsibility – of sensing that we’re not sure of a particular point of grammar, for example, and in looking it up, and getting it to work properly.

Sometimes we come across people in our professional lives who think that this sort of thing doesn’t matter very much, and it’s silly to make a fuss about it. If only a few people recognise and object to a dangling participle, for example, and most readers don’t notice and sort of get the sense anyway, why bother to get it right? Well, I discovered a very good answer to that, and it goes like this: if most people don’t notice when we get it wrong, they won’t mind if we get it right. And if we do get it right, we’ll please the few who do know and care about these things, so everyone will be happy.

A simple example: the thing that annoys me most at the moment is the silly confusion between may and might. ‘Without the code-breaking work at Bletchley Park, Britain may well have lost the Second World War,’ you hear people say, as if they’re not sure whether we did or not. What they mean is, ‘Britain might well have lost the Second World War.’ They should bloody well learn how to say it. Anyway, when I see someone getting that sort of thing right, I become just a little more sure that I can rely on the language they’re using.

Of course, we can make our characters talk any way we like. It used to be one of the ways in which snobbish writers would mark the difference between characters who were to be admired and those who were to be condescended to. I think we’ve grown a little beyond that now; but when a present-day writer hears the difference between ‘bored with’ and ‘bored of’, and uses it with brilliant accuracy to mark not so much a class difference as a generational one, as Neil Gaiman does in his marvellous book Coraline, then he’s being responsible to the language in just the way I’m talking about.

As well as taking care of the words, we should take care of the expressions, the idioms. We should become attuned to our own utterances; we should install a little mental bell that rings when we’re using expressions that are second-hand or blurred through too much use. We should try always to use language to illuminate, reveal and clarify rather than obscure, mislead and conceal. The language should be safe in our hands – safer than it is in those of politicians, for example; at the least, people should be able to say that we haven’t left it any poorer, or clumsier, or less precise.

The aim must always be clarity. It’s tempting to feel that if a passage of writing is obscure, it must be very deep. But if the water is murky, the bottom might be only an inch below the surface – you just can’t tell. It’s much better to write in such a way that the readers can see all the way down; but that’s not the end of it, because you then have to provide interesting things down there for them to look at. Telling a story involves thinking of some interesting events, putting them in the best order to bring out the connections between them, and telling about them as clearly as we can; and if we get the last part right, we won’t be able to disguise any failure with the first – which is actually the most difficult, and the most important.

When it comes to imaginative language, to rich and inventive imagery, we have to beware. But what we have to beware of is too much caution. We must never say to ourselves: ‘That’s a good image – very clever; too clever for this book, though – save it up for something important.’ Someone who never did that, someone who put the best of his imagination into everything he wrote, was the great Leon Garfield. Here’s a passage from one of my favourites among his books, The Pleasure Garden (1976):

Mrs Bray was the proprietress of the Mulberry Garden… Although a widow for seven years, she still wore black, which lent her bulk a certain mystery; sometimes it was hard to see where she ended and the night began. Dr Dormann, standing beside her, looked thinner than ever, really no more than a mere slice of a man who might have come off Mrs Bray in a carelessly slammed door.

There’s fast-food language, and there’s caviar language; one of the things we adults need to do for children is to introduce them to the pleasures of the subtle and the complex. One way to do that, of course, is to let them see us enjoying it, and then forbid them to touch it, on the grounds that it’s too grown-up for them, their minds aren’t ready to cope with it, it’s too strong, it’ll drive them mad with strange and uncontrollable desires. If that doesn’t make them want to try it, nothing will.

Next in my list of responsibilities comes honesty – emotional honesty. We should never try to draw on emotional credit to which our story is not entitled. A few years ago, I read a novel – a pretty undistinguished family story – which, in an attempt to wring tears from the reader, quite gratuitously introduced a Holocaust theme. The theme had nothing to do with the story – it was there for one purpose only, which was to force a particular response and then graft it onto the book. An emotional response from the reader is a precious thing – it’s the reader’s gift to us, in a way; they should be able to trust the stimulus that provokes it. It’s perfectly possible – difficult, but possible – to write an honest story about the Holocaust, or about slavery, or about any of the other terrible things that human beings have done to one another, but that was a dishonest one. Stories should earn their own tears and not pilfer them from elsewhere.

When it comes to the sheer craft of depicting things, describing them, saying what happened, the film director and playwright David Mamet said something very interesting. He said that the basic storytelling question is: ‘Where do I put the camera?’

Thinking about that fascinating, that fathomlessly interesting, question is part of our responsibility towards the craft. Taking cinematography as a metaphor for storytelling, and realising that around every subject there are 360 degrees of space, and an infinity of positions from very close to very far, from very low to very high, at which you can put that camera – then it seems that the great director, the great storyteller, knows immediately and without thinking what the best position is, and goes there unhesitatingly. They seem to see it as clearly as we can see that leaves are green.

A good director will choose one of the half-dozen best positions. A bad director won’t know, and will move the camera about, fidgeting with the angles, trying all sorts of tricky shots or fancy ways of telling the story, and forgetting that the function of the camera is not to draw attention to itself, but to show something else – the subject – with as much clarity as it can manage.

But actually, the truth is that great directors only seem as if they know the best place at once. The notebooks of great writers and composers are full of hesitations and mistakes and crossings-out; perhaps the real difference is that they keep on till they’ve found the best place to put the camera. The responsibility of those of us who are neither very good nor very bad is to imitate the best, to look closely at what they do and try to emulate it, to take the greatest as our models.

What I want to say next has to do with an attitude I suppose one could call tact. I mean that we who tell stories should be modest about the job, and not assume that just because the reader is interested in the story, they’re interested in who’s telling it. A storyteller should be invisible, as far as I’m concerned; and the best way to make sure of that is to make the story itself so interesting that the teller just… disappears. When I was in the business of helping students to become teachers, I used to urge them to tell stories in the classroom – not read them from a book, but get out and tell them, face to face, with nothing to hide behind. The students were very nervous until they tried it. They thought that under the pressure of all those wide-open eyes, they’d melt into a puddle of self-consciousness. But the brave ones tried it, and they always came back next week and reported with amazement that it worked, they could do it. What was happening was that the children were gazing, not at the storyteller, but at the story she was telling. The teller had become invisible, and the story worked much more effectively as a result.

Of course, you have to find a good story in the first place, but we can all do that. There are thousands of good stories in the world, and it’s perfectly possible for every young teacher to acquire three dozen or so and to know them well enough to tell them all, once a week, throughout a school year. Responsibility again: I salute all those who gather folk tales and give them back to us. Jane Yolen’s marvellous Favorite Folktales from Around the World is a splendid example of this. So are the collections made by Alan Garner, by Kevin Crossley-Holland, by Neil Philip, by Katharine Briggs. The oral traditions of storytelling once seemed to be on the verge of dying out, but they didn’t die; they’re being kept alive by new generations of storytellers. And many of those who tell stories these days get their stories not from Granny or from Old Bob down in the Red Lion, but from books, because that’s where they’ll find them.

And there’s nothing exclusive about stories, nothing snobbish, nothing stand-offish. They make themselves at home anywhere. Nowadays a storyteller in Ireland can learn Australian stories, an African storyteller can tell Indonesian stories, a storyteller in Poland can tell Inuit stories. Should we storytellers make sure we pass on the experience of our own culture? Yes, of course. It’s one of our prime duties. But should we only tell stories that reflect our own background? Should we refrain from telling stories that originated elsewhere, on the grounds that we don’t have the right to annex the experience of others? Absolutely not. A culture that never encounters any others becomes first inward-looking, and then stagnant, and then rotten. We are responsible – there’s that word again – for bringing fresh streams of story into our own cultures from all over the world, and welcoming experience from every quarter, and offering our own experience in return.

And as I say, invisibility is important here. When it comes to actually putting the story across, the best storytellers are the tactful ones, those who don’t burden the audience with their own self-consciousness, whether it’s just plain nervousness at speaking in public or a complex intellectual post-modernist angst about the unreliability of signifiers and the slippery nature of the relationship between text and utterance. Whatever it is, we should put all that aside and try to say what happened, and who did what, and what happened next. That’s all. The way to deal with feeling self-conscious is to pretend that we don’t. Don’t let’s burden other people with our own embarrassment. That’s what I mean by responsibility here: it’s a form of tact. It helps us remember to be courteous to our readers and listeners.

And that leads me to the next thing I want to talk about, which is the matter of responsibility to the audience. Knowing that our readership includes children – notice, I don’t say consists of children, because every children’s book is also read by adults – but knowing that there are children reading us, what should our attitude be? Where does our responsibility lie?

Some commentators – not very well-informed ones, but they have quite loud voices – say that children’s books shouldn’t deal with matters like sex and drugs, with violence, or homosexuality, or abortion, or child abuse. Taboos do change over time: only a couple of generations ago, it was rare to find a children’s book that confronted divorce. Against that, I’ve heard it said that children should be able to find in a children’s book anything that they might realistically encounter in life. Children do know about these things: they talk about them, they ask questions about them, they meet some of them, sometimes, at home; shouldn’t they be able to read about them in stories?

My feeling is that whatever we depict in our stories, we should show that actions have consequences. An example of this came up with Melvin Burgess’s Carnegie Medal-winning novel Junk (1998). The predictable journalists said the predictable things, and the book created a storm of controversy. I defended Burgess on the grounds that in this book, he shows exactly the sort of responsibility that I’m talking about. It’s a profoundly moral story, because it shows that temptation is truly tempting, and – as I said – that actions have consequences.

There are other kinds of responsibility to the audience too. Some writers feel that they shouldn’t take too bleak a view of the world, that however dark and gloomy the story they’re telling, they should always leave the reader with a glimpse of hope. I think that has something to be said for it, but we should remember that tragedy is uplifting too, if it shows the human spirit at its finest. ‘The true aim of writing,’ said Samuel Johnson, ‘is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.’ Children need both those kinds of help, just as grown-ups do.

What’s true about our responsibility towards depicting life in general is true of our responsibility when it comes to depicting people. There’s a sentence I saw not long ago from Walter Savage Landor, which is the best definition of this sort of responsibility I’ve ever seen: ‘We must not indulge in unfavourable views of mankind, since by doing it we make bad men believe that they are no worse than others, and we teach the good that they are good in vain.’ Easy cynicism is no more truthful than easy optimism, though it seems to be so to the young.

So in depicting characters who struggle to do good, and do it, or who are tempted to be weak or greedy, but refrain, we the storytellers are providing our readers with friends whose own good behaviour, and whose high valuation of the courage or steadfastness or generosity of others, provides an image of how to behave well; and thus, we hope, we leave the world at least no worse than we found it.

But what about our responsibility to our readers in a more simple and basic sense? They write to us – many, many of them write. Should we respond to them all? I don’t think there’s any doubt in the mind of the writer who receives the first fan letter they’ve ever got. Of course they respond. It’s wonderful! Someone out there loves me! But as you become better known, the number creeps up and creeps up, and you find yourself spending more and more time sending every individual child a reply. Should you carry on responding in the same sort of way, no matter how many of them write, no matter how much time it takes up?

It’s difficult. The contact between the storyteller and the reader is a very close and personal one – more so from the reader’s side, because they know both who they are and who I am, whereas I only know who I am. But there’s no frustration quite as baffling as that felt by the writer who receives a wonderful letter from a child who’s forgotten to enclose his or her address. They long for a reply – they deserve a reply – I want to reply – they’ll think I’m mean and arrogant if I don’t reply…

But what can we do about it? Well, not all that long ago, there was nothing we could do. But I had a delightful letter recently from a child somewhere in America who told me all about herself, how she loved my books, how she played the violin, and so on; but the publisher had forwarded it without including the envelope, and there was no address. My son suggested we try Google, so we typed in the child’s name and presently there it was – I almost felt it should have been announced with the words ‘Lo and behold’ – a school in Pennsylvania was presenting a concert featuring a violin solo by… and there was her name. Amazing! So at least I could write to her, care of the school, and I did.

But it does take time, and as our books reach more and more readers, our time gets more and more eaten into. I don’t mind spending a few minutes searching for things like that, while I can still manage to do so; but I’m less conscientious, shall we say, about the letters that say, ‘I had to do this book report and we had to write to an author and I picked you because no one else did. You have to send me a reply or I will get a bad grade also can I have a photograph and a signed copy of your book The Golden Spyglass here are my questions. Where do you get your ideas from? What is your favourite colour? Do you have any pets? What is a spyglass?’ And there was a good one recently from a boy who said, ‘We have been studying obituaries in school and we have to write the obituary of someone famous and I would like to do you. Could you tell me how you would like to die and can you make it as dramatic as possible?’ I told him that I would prefer to let nature take its course. They all do get a reply, eventually, but it takes time.

Almost the last in my list of responsibilities is this: we have to pay attention to what our imagination feels comfortable doing. In my own case, for reasons too deeply buried to be dug up, I have long felt that realism is a higher mode than fantasy; but when I try to write realistically, I move in boots of lead. However, as soon as the idea comes to me, for example, of little people with poison spurs who ride on dragonflies, the lead boots fall away and I feel wings at my heels. For many reasons (which, as I say, are beyond the reach of disinterment) I may regret this tendency of my imagination, but I can’t deny it. Sometimes our nature speaks more wisely than our convictions, and we’ll only work well if we listen to what it says.

But now I come to the most important responsibility of all. It’s the one that’s hardest to explain, but also the one I feel most strongly about. The last responsibility I want to look at is one that every storyteller has to acknowledge, and it’s a responsibility that trumps every other. It’s a responsibility to the story itself. I first became conscious of this when I noticed that I’d developed the habit of hunching my shoulders to protect my work from prying eyes. There are various equivalents of the hunched shoulder and the encircling arm: if we’re working on the computer, for example, we tend to keep a lot of empty space at the foot of the piece, so that if anyone comes into the room we can immediately press that key that takes us to the end of the file, and show nothing but a blank screen. We’re protecting it. There’s something fragile there, something fugitive, which shows itself only to us, because it trusts us to maintain it in this half-resolved, half-unformed condition without exposing it to the harsh light of someone else’s scrutiny, because a stranger’s gaze would either make it flee altogether or fix it for good in a state that might not be what it wanted to become.

So we have a protective responsibility: the role of a guardian, almost a parent. It feels as if the story – before it’s even taken the form of words, before it has any characters or any incidents clearly revealed, when it’s just a thought, just the most evanescent little wisp of a thing – as if it’s come to us and knocked at our door, or just been left on our doorstep. Of course we have to look after it. What else could we do?

What I seem to be saying here, rather against my will, is that stories come from somewhere else. It’s hard to rationalise this, because I don’t believe in a somewhere else; there ain’t no elsewhere, is what I believe. Here is all there is. It certainly feels as if the story comes to me, but perhaps it comes from me, from my unconscious mind – I just don’t know; and it wouldn’t make any difference to the responsibility either way. I still have to look after it. I still have to protect it from interference while it becomes sure of itself and settles on the form it wants.

Yes, it wants. It knows very firmly what it wants to be, even though it isn’t very articulate yet. It’ll go easily in this direction and very firmly resist going in that, but I won’t know why; I just have to shrug and say, ‘OK – you’re the boss.’ And this is the point where responsibility takes the form of service. Not servitude; not shameful toil mercilessly exacted; but service, freely and fairly entered into. This service is a voluntary and honourable thing: when I say I am the servant of the story, I say it with pride.

And as the servant, I have to do what a good servant should. I have to be ready to attend to my work at regular hours. I have to anticipate where the story wants to go, and find out what can make the progress easier – by doing research, that is to say: by spending time in libraries, by going to talk to people, by finding things out. I have to keep myself sober during working hours; I have to stay in good health. I have to avoid taking on too many other engagements: no man can serve two masters. I have to keep the story’s counsel: there are secrets between us, and it would be the grossest breach of confidence to give them away. (I sometimes think that the only way I could survive a creative writing class would be to write two stories – a fake one which I’d bring out to share with the class and be critiqued, and a real one which I’d work on in silence and keep to myself).

And I have to be prepared for a certain wilfulness and eccentricity in my employer – all the classic master-and-servant stories, after all, depict the master as the crazy one who’s blown here and there by the winds of impulse or passion, and the servant as the matter-of-fact anchor of common sense; and I have too much regard for the classic stories to go against a pattern as successful as that. So, as I say, I have to expect a degree of craziness in the story.

‘No, master! Those are windmills, not giants!’

‘Windmills? Nonsense – they’re giants, I tell you! But don’t worry – I’ll deal with them.’

‘As you say, master – giants they are, by all means.’

No matter how foolish it seems, the story knows best.

And finally, as the faithful servant, I have to know when to let the story out of my hands; but I have to be very careful about the other hands I put it into. My stories have always been lucky in their editors – or perhaps, since I’m claiming responsibility here, they’ve been lucky they had me to guide them to the right ones. I suppose one’s last and most responsible act as the servant of the story is to know when one can do no more, and when it’s time to admit that someone else’s eyes might see it more clearly. To become so grand that you refuse to let your work be edited – and we can all think of a few writers who got to that point – is to be a bad servant, not a good one. Well, that’s all I know about responsibility.

But I haven’t quite finished, because I don’t want anyone to think that responsibility is all there is to it. It would be a burdensome life, if the only relation we had with our work was one of duty and care. The fact is that I love my work. There is no joy comparable to the thrill that accompanies a new idea, one that we know is full of promise and possibility – unless it’s the joy that comes when, after a long period of reflection and bafflement, of frustration and difficulty, we suddenly see the way through to the solution; or the delight when one of our characters suddenly says something far too witty for us to have thought of ourselves; or the slow, steady pleasure that comes from the regular accumulation of pages written; or the honest satisfaction that rewards work done well – a turn in the story deftly handled, a passage of dialogue that reveals character as well as advancing the story, a pattern of imagery that unobtrusively echoes and clarifies the theme of the whole book.

These joys are profound and long-lasting. And there is a joy too in responsibility itself – in the knowledge that what we’re doing on earth, while we live, is being done to the best of our ability, and in the light of everything we know about what is good and true. Art, whatever kind of art it is, is like the mysterious music described in the words of the greatest writer of all, the ‘sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not’. To bear the responsibility of giving delight and hurting not is one of the greatest privileges a human being can have, and I ask nothing more than the chance to go on being responsible for it till the end of my days.

THIS TALK WAS GIVEN AT THE SOCIETY OF AUTHORS CHILDREN’S WRITERS AND ILLUSTRATORS GROUP CONFERENCE, LEEDS, SEPTEMBER 2002.

There are other responsibilities, of course. In the years since I wrote this piece, the world of bookselling and publishing has changed enormously, and if I were giving this talk today I’d certainly say something about the need to preserve the best aspects of publishing (close editorial attention, the preservation of a midlist and a backlist, a mutual respect and understanding of common interest between author and publisher) and of bookselling (the knowledge and enthusiasm of individual booksellers, combined with the ability to exercise them free of overbearing commercial pressures towards the bland sameness of a narrow range of stock). The world of books is not a collection of random units of self-interest, but a living ecology. Or it used to be, and should be still. Whenever we can see something going on in any field where we can make a difference on the side of virtue, we have a responsibility to make it.

The Writing of Stories

MAKING IT UP AND WRITING IT DOWN

On the choices an author has to make as he tells a story, with special reference to points of view, time frames and story-patterns, using as an example the opening of Northern Lights and other parts of His Dark Materials

WHAT I’M GOING TO TALK ABOUT TODAY IS NOT THE READING OF literature, or of children’s literature, but the writing of stories. I discovered thirty-five years ago in this university, if not in this room, that one thing I’m very bad at doing is literary criticism; but in the course of the subsequent thirty-five years I have learned something about the practical business of telling stories, so what I have to tell you today is actual hands-on stuff, what it’s like to be in the middle of a story as you’re telling it, and what considerations weigh with you, and what you can do when you’re stuck, and that sort of thing.

I say stories rather than novels, because I think of my novels firstly as stories, and only then as books, and only then as novels. Besides, I have published some stories that aren’t novels, and they’re just as difficult and interesting to write – I mean fairy tales such as Clockwork, or The Firework-Maker’s Daughter. As I say this, I seem to be implying a sort of distinction here between story and literature, if you like, or between the making-up part and the writing-down part, or the events and the sentences. It is a real distinction, and it’s recognised in narratology, for example, which has found a number of terms to express this difference: substance and form, content and expression, story and discourse, fabula and sjuzhet, and so on.

And I suppose we could go on here to distinguish between the sort of books that give prominence to one half of these opposed pairs, and the sort that favours the other; those where the story is more important than the words and those where the words are more important than the story; and you’d then have opposed pairs like genre fiction and literary fiction, popular art and high art – that sort of thing. G. K. Chesterton was thinking about this distinction when he said that literature was a luxury, but fiction was a necessity. Whether or not we agree with his conclusion, we can see the distinction he was making.

Well, no book is entirely the one or entirely the other – it couldn’t be. And what many writers try to do, of course, is provide both at once. But your nature, the nature of your particular talent, is rarely as balanced as your intentions, and I realised some time ago that I belong at the vulgar end of the literary spectrum. I suppose it would be nice if you could send back your talents and ask for a different set, but you can’t do that. You’re stuck with the dæmon you’ve got, as Lyra learns. However, I’m reconciled to my limitations, because much as I enjoy the writing-down part, and hard as I try to do it as well as I can, I do find that the making-up part is where my heart lies.

So what I have to say today is mainly about that, but inevitably I’ll be saying something about the writing-down part as well, and sometimes they’ll be hard to tell apart.

I’m going to start with the first sentence of the first part of His Dark Materials.

Lyra and her dæmon moved through the darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen. (NL, 3)

Stories have to begin. Out of the welter of events and ideas and pictures and characters and voices that you experience in your head, you the storyteller must choose one moment, the most suitable moment, and make that the start. You could begin anywhere in the chronology, of course; you could begin in the middle, in medias res, which is a soundly classical way to begin; but you do have to begin somewhere. One of your sentences is going to be the first.

So: where are you going to start, and what are you going to say?

There’s an image here from science which I find useful when I think about this. Coleridge, apparently, used to go to scientific lectures to renew his stock of metaphors, and while I would never dream of saying that the main function of science is the production of metaphors for subsequent development in the arts, science is damned useful to steal from. The one I find helpful here is the idea of phase space – as far as I understand it, that is. Phase space is a term from dynamics, and it refers to the profound complexity of changing systems. It’s the notional space that contains not just the actual consequences of the present moment, but all the possible consequences. The phase space of a game of noughts and crosses, for instance, would contain every possible outcome of every possible initial move, and the actual course of a game could be represented by a path starting from the one move that was actually made – a path winding past numbers of choices not made.

Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

I took the one less travelled by.

And that has made all the difference.

Of course, it does make all the difference. And we do have to choose: we can’t go more ways than one. I am surely not the only writer who has the distinct sense that every sentence I write is surrounded by the ghosts of the sentences I could have written at that point, but chose not to. Those ghosts represent the phase space of what you could have said next. (One of the advantages of writing on paper and not on the screen is that some of those sentences remain and can be resurrected from the grave of the crossings-out.)

So the opening of your story brings with it a phase space. For example: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that…’

Well, that what? The phase space implied by that opening is enormous. You can imagine Jane Austen saying to herself ‘That’s great! That’s terrific! What an opening! Now, what can I say next?’ She could have gone on to say, ‘…all happy families resemble one another, whereas each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Jane Austen writing the first sentence of Anna Karenina: lost moments from the history of literature. She would have crossed it out at once and said: ‘What nonsense! This will never do.’

Now this can be paralysing, if you’re not careful. If you let the thought of all the things you could say get the upper hand, it becomes very hard to say anything. And if you’re also aware that your audience is at least as clever as you are, and you know that they too are aware of all the things you could have said, you might begin to feel that they’re raising their eyebrows at the one you do say – which makes you even more self-conscious, and the choice even more awkward.

The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his letters about the painter’s fear of the blank canvas – the canvas, he said, is far more afraid of the painter.

So you begin. In this case I wanted to put my main character, Lyra, on the page as soon as possible. Her name is the first word in the story, as it is the last in the complete trilogy. You want to engage the reader’s sympathy at once. Alfred Hitchcock said something interesting about this: he pointed out that if a film begins by following a burglar into an empty house, and watching him ransack the drawers, then when the lights of the owner’s car show up outside the window, we think: hurry up! They’re coming! We don’t want them to catch him. We’re on his side, because we started with him. I wanted the readers on Lyra’s side from the start.