![]() It wasn’t until I’d got halfway through Northern Lights that I realised I was writing a story about leaving childhood behind I hoped this new venture would turn out to let me write realistically about human beings while making up whatever they needed by way of a world to live and breathe and move and work in. The only stories I could write confidently were set in this world at another time ( the Sally Lockhart series, set in the 1870s and 80s), or fairy tales ( Clockwork, The Firework-Maker’s Daughter, and so on), or at our own time in another world: the kind of thing that became His Dark Materials. I could probably have written a realistic novel about teaching in the sort of school I was teaching in at the time, but I didn’t want to, probably because I wouldn’t have wanted to read one and because of a combination of timidity and idleness, I knew practically nothing about anything else. I didn’t want to write a pure fantasy of the Tolkien sort, unconnected at any point with the real world, because the real world was exactly what fiction ought to be dealing with but I’d always felt ignorant about the real world, whatever and wherever that was. ![]() It was like ours, but different, so I could take account of the real-world changes that helped my story, and ignore those that didn’t. To some extent, my story was protected from awkward change because I set it in a world that was not ours. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |