Why writers should listen to Daemon Voices

Philip Pullman, the author most famous for the His Dark Materials trilogy, has collected thirty-two essays, speeches, and introductions in Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling. He wrote the oldest in 1997, the newest in 2014. While there is a certain amount of inevitable repetition, they are all fascinating. Here's a working writer letting you into his head for 436 pages to show you what he's learned about himself as a writer and what he knows about storytelling.

As the editor's introduction points out, Pullman is interested in the discoveries of science, the freedoms of democracy, the evils of authoritarianism, the pitfalls of education, the arguments of religion, and "above all, in human nature, how we live and love and fight and betray and console one another. How we explain ourselves to ourselves." The essays all have a single theme however: storytelling.

To make such a variegated miscellany more accessible, the book includes a Topic Finder (and an index) to group together essays which touch on the themes. Topics include Children's Literature;  Education and Story; His Dark Materials; My Other Books; Reading; The Writer; and The Practice of Writing.

You need not have read Pullman's trilogy—The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass—to enjoy Daemon Voices. (Although if you haven't, I recommend you do for the trilogy's own reward.) Rather, if you write fiction or aspire to write fiction, you can cherry-pick Daemon Voices for the insights it can give you and, ideally, help you become a better writer.

For example, Pullman believes the basic storytelling question is: "Where do you see the scene from? What do you tell the reader about it? What's your stance toward the characters?" One way to avoid the difficulties these problems cause "is to use a first-person and present tense way of telling the story . . . So I'm not surprised when writers choose the present tense, because it helps them to feel neutral, uncommitted, objective, and to avoid making the wrong choice of camera position." But the writer is not neutral, uncommitted, objective. Not ever.

"You privilege this over that by the mere fact of focusing on it," say Pullman. "What you give up when you write in the present tense is a whole wide range of stuff that you could say, and which is available to you through the grammar—the rich field of time itself, continuing time, or intermittent time, or time that was and now is no longer, or time that might come one day."

Pullman uses the metaphor of the wood and the path to talk about stories. The wood—or forest or jungle if you will—is all of reality, the place in which anything can happen. It is everything there is, or might be, or is not but we write stories about anyway: space aliens, ghosts, travel between alternate universes, even (pace Philip) God.

The path is structure. It leads from here to there, and even when it doubles back and crosses itself it has a purpose. "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," he writes. "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 notional space where their histories exist, and where their future lives are going to continue after the story reaches the last page."

As a writer, I find these ideas (just a snippet from the book) useful. Where does the story start? In what wood does the story take place? To cite examples from my own writing: In Cleveland hotel room? A Japanese town? A New York City housing project? And what does the reader need to know about this particular woodland? How little is not enough and how much is too much?

I have told writing students who didn't know better that there are no rules in writing fiction (or, there are only two rules but no one knows what they are). Pullman argues there are rules, the first is that stories must begin. You can begin anywhere, but if you start with pages describing the weather, or the history of Charles II, or the recipe for beef Wellington without any reference to human involvement, it's probably not the most engaging way to begin.

Another rule concerns consistency. Would "such-and-such a move violate a unity or destroy a mood or contradict a proposition?" If, two chapters from the end of the book, the detective is suddenly able to read minds, you've violated this rule even if it makes it easier to solve the murder. Pullman also argues for consistency of tone. And he says one rule is so important he's written it on a piece of paper and stuck it above  his desk: "Don't be afraid of the obvious." Writers violate this rule when, in an effort to avoid stock situations, stereotyped characters, and second-hand plot devices, they no longer tell a story but instead make it perfectly clear they they're "too exquisite and fastidious to be taken in by any trite common little idea." How often have you read a book where the writing—the sentences, the vocabulary—is more vivid than the story?

You may not agree with every one of Pullman's ideas, but I believe they are all worth considering. I found Daemon Voices so rich, so thought-provoking I plan to read it again.