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.

But you do make choices. You can’t help it. That’s the way narrative works. You privilege this over that by the mere fact of focusing on it.

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

My stories are about something, to be sure, but I never know what that is till I’m in the process of writing them.

we have to pay attention to what our imagination feels comfortable doing.

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

You often need more than one person in a scene to make it work.

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.

So we have a protective responsibility: the role of a guardian, almost a parent.