Status Updates From Daemon Voices: On Stories a...

"...understanding that since the loss of innocence is inevitable, we should welcome it and embrace the next stage of our development instead of hiding our eyes from it. Knowing about good and evil is not the same as embracing evil, though it might look like that to a church that likes to think it has all the answers."

"If you leave the path, the readers put down the book...meanwhile the book is lying there forgotten. Because you left the path. Because you became more interested in the wood, in the elaborating all the richness and invention of the wood you're making. Never leave the path." Exactly. I can tell that Pullman has some sharp criticisms of Tolkien and Martin as they like to elaborate in their worlds a lot.

"The business of the storyteller, or the novelist, it seems to me, is with the path and not the wood." Exactly. The amount of the woods that we as readers should see should only be what is along the path of the story. We as readers should not have a path that disappears or is vague and undefined that it takes us a while to get back on. It should be focused and clear.

"Different kinds of stories expect different kinds of audience and certain kinds of attitudes from that audience." All too true. And this does not just apply to creation stories from around the world, but also lectures, both academic and religious, and the ones we write down.

Describing "heaven's armies" digging mines for metal, creating guns, and using them on devils makes this depiction of Lucifer's fall quite hilarious in its contemporary-ness. You don't hear of this in the Catholic Catechisms or other liturgical teachings lol.

Imagine if school children today read Milton's "Paradise Lost" in class? Lol. Seems to have been a loss for everyone.

Sellotape? Is that the British equivalent of scotch tape? And is that where J.K. Rowling got the inspiration for "Spellotape" in Harry Potter? After over 10 years of reading HP, I finally made that connection!

Learning about the theme of His Dark Materials makes me want to read it now. But it is also inspiring me to reflect on the them of my own series and put it into focus.

"And the first result of [Adam and Eve] eating the fruit was embarrassment. They knew they were naked; it hadn't occurred to them before. Knowledge comes with a cost...But once they had eaten the fruit, consciousness was open to them, and with consciousness came self-consciousness, awkwardness, embarrassment, sorrow, grief, and pain." Either we must be innocent of the world, or become wise to it.

"Readers—especially an audience that includes young readers—aren't in the least interested in you, and your self-conscious post-modernist anguish about all the things there are to be anguished about when it comes to text. They want to know what happened next."
Thank you! I would like to know if Pullman does writers' conferences now and if he still says these things. If he does, it's likely he's not invited anymore.

Unlike these kids that Pullman taught, dialogue is harder for me to write compared to descriptive language.

"So my heresy is to suggest that eternal life is not a reward, but the most cruel punishment, imposed on us by God for the sin of seeking to grow up and become wise." Oof, I can see why some Christians would have a problem with this author.

"'I must create my own system, or be enslaved by another man's'" This is why it's important to know your influences, recognize you're being influenced by another person's ideas, and with that recognition and clarity, you can make the choice to either follow through on that other person's ideas or continue with telling the story that you want to tell.

"This is not a story about how wonderful it was to be a child, and its dominating principle is not nostalgia and regret. It's a story about how necessary it is to grow up, and its dominating principle is realism and hope." Some would say that this is in contrast to C.S. Lewis's themes in the Chronicles of Narnia, especially when it came to the later books.

"Innocence is not wise; wisdom cannot be innocent. And it's very painful and it's very hard, but it's the only way forward, and in the end, if we keep trying, we shall have acquired a deeper, fuller, richer understanding than we ever had before we tasted the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil." Very poignant.

"'Where do I put the camera?' I think that's the very basic storytelling question. Where do you see the scene from? What do you tell the reader about it? What's your stance toward the characters?" Again, going back to that essential question of what is your focus? There should be no unnecessary meandering or distractions from the focus of these characters. They should be the focus, not something chewing the scenery.

"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." I'm reminded of when SpongeBob was assigned a written assignment and he just sat there unsure of what to write. He spent more time trying to begin with "the" than anything else.

"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." Very true.

"'We have been studying obituaries in school and we have to write an 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 can imagine the laughter from the audience when the author shared this child's letter. That's funny.

"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...I read a novel that gratuitously introduced a Holocaust theme. The theme had nothing to do with the story—it was there for one purpose only, which is to force a particular response and then graft it onto the book. Stories should earn their tears and not pilfer them

"The aim must always be clarity...It's much better to write in such a way that the reader can see all the way down...Telling a story involves thinking of some interesting events, putting them in the best order to bring out the connections between them, and telling them as clearly as we can." No meanderings, no side-commentaries, no beating off the track. I get bored and fall asleep when the focus is elsewhere.

"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 well and as profitably as we can." This sentiment is certainly not shared by some modern writers, especially those who are political activists in regards to their writing. They don't write to make money, they write to send a message.

After the "Fantasy Character Creator" book, I'm interested to see what this book provides. From the sound of it, there's more essays, which reminds me of when I read Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey." Hopefully it's not as dry as that.