Samuel Peterson’s Reviews > Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling > Status Update

"...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.