Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling

SOMETIMES, BY CHANCE OR FATE OR THE WORKINGS OF AN INSCRUTABLE Providence, we meet exactly the right work of art at exactly the right time to have the maximum impact on us.

And I want to stress again that the business of the storyteller is with the story-line, with the path. You can make your story-wood, your invented world, as rich and full as you like, but be very, very careful not to be tempted off the path.

And while you’re doing that, if you also give the reader enough visual clues for them to know where a scene is taking place, and who’s present, and what time of day it is, and where the light’s coming from; if you make it clear who’s speaking and what they’re saying; if you put the camera in the best place, and don’t move it till you need to; if yo

But something happens to them as they grow up; they become aware of the difference between what they can do and what accomplished artists can do; they realise that their pictures look clumsy, ill-coordinated, naïve, in a word childish; and they lose the confidence to work as freely as they used to. A sort of cramp seizes their hands. They say, ‘Oh,

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

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.

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.

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

I have to start with pictures, images, scenes, moods – like bits of dreams, or fragments of half-forgotten films. That’s how they all begin.