I was happy to discover that, because I thought I might have something to say about it I was just rather surprised to find that the story I was writing had been perfectly shaped, no doubt by my unconscious mind, to contain and express it.Īnyway, the final part, The Amber Spyglass, was published in 2000, and I went on to write other things. In the case of His Dark Materials, it wasn’t until I’d got halfway through the first part, Northern Lights, that I realised I was writing a story about leaving childhood behind, or the journey from innocence to experience.

If I’m lucky a theme becomes visible to me before I reach the end of the story, so I can go back and cut, or shape, or move, or amplify, or reduce various parts of the text in order to clarify the theme I’m beginning to see. In fact I don’t start with a theme in mind at all, but with characters in particular situations. I know some writers do start with a theme and make up a story to illustrate it, and some fine books have been written like that. Surely it should be possible to write fantasy (if that was what this was: I still don’t like that term) so as to embody a theme from the real world?īut that aim or purpose, or theme, wasn’t where I started. 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.

Philip pullman