Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling

The world or the wood can be as detailed and rich as we like. But the path, which is Cinderella’s own story, goes from here to there, going through this part and that part. Always. And the business of the storyteller, or the novelist, it seems to me, is with the path and not the wood.

Recently I answered online a number of questions from readers of His Dark Materials, including this one: ‘Is a reader “allowed” to have a Christian/religious reading of a text that is supposed to be atheistic?’ What seems to be going on here is the feeling that reading is a sort of test, which the reader passes or fails according to how closely the

it’s full of charm and strangeness. It’s non-linear. It just grew. The path, on the other hand, is a structure. And it has a function: it leads from here to there, or from A to B.

It’s the difference between the story-world and the story-line.

can tell me something useful). So the wood, or the forest, is the sum of all possibilities, and, as I have mentioned elsewhere, I found a nicely scientific-sounding term for it in a book about elementary physics. The term is phase space.

And meanwhile the book is lying there forgotten. Because you left the path. Because you became more interested in the wood, in elaborating all the richness and invention of the world you’re making up. Never leave the path.

Each novel or story is a path (because it’s linear, because it begins on page one and goes on steadily through all the pages in the usual order until it gets to the end) that goes through a wood. The wood is the world in which the characters live and have their being; it’s the realm of all the things that could possibly happen to them; it’s the not

Stories are not only a sequence of things that happen, they are also – or they can be – patterns as well. The shape of the story-line can weave in and out in a shape which is attractive in an abstract way, which is aesthetically pleasing no matter what it means.

If they didn’t want me to steal from their story, they shouldn’t have invited me into it – that’s my view.