In Other Words Daemon Voices by Philip Pullman

I hate books about writing. As a writer, I freely admit this, though also, as a writer, I am frequently the recipient of books about writing from well-meaning — nay, loving — friends and family members. But authors of immersive fiction, the kind with spaceships and dragons and vampires, don’t write because they love the idea of writing. Writing is, instead, the vehicle by which they escape from the world in which they are bound by their corporeal bodies, and enter into the one they populate for themselves. Reading about writing has a way of stripping the magic away from an activity that many of us view as a kind of sacred voodoo.

Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling by Philip Pullman is an exception to all of that, a series of essays (and some talks) on the topic of writing and storytelling, aimed at being helpful for those who are engaged in the practice. It’s a book where you highlight more than half the passages on any given page and might only read a page at a time because you’re so verklempt. Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials series (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass ) is a writer’s writer, who treats his work with respect despite not expecting that others do so. “I realised some time ago that I belong at the vulgar end of the literary spectrum,” he writes. “I suppose it would be nice if you could send back your talents and ask for a different set, but you can’t do that . ... I’m reconciled to my limitations, because much as I enjoy the writing-down part, ... I do find that the making-up part is where my heart lies.” Killing me softly, Philip Pullman.

It is hard to conceive of anyone who is not a fiction writer, or possibly in love with a fiction writer (which is in itself a kind of beautiful masochism), finding anything but a map of madness within Daemon Voices. But for fabulists, reading Daemon Voices is almost like entering group therapy. All the neuroses, odd behaviors, and petty-seeming obsessions are laid bare and thus given real value; when Pullman describes the act of hiding one’s story from prying eyes until it is finished, for example — being secretive and protective and weird about it all at once — it’s cathartic to know that one is not alone. Pullman gets deep into the weeds of storytelling: the agonies of a plot that won’t turn, a character who won’t behave, or a point that refuses to fit the narrative. He offers up the kind of advice that is borne of having wrestled with the same problems.

Pullman sheds light on why a person might walk around in circles in the living room for hours talking to themselves (dialogue is best composed out loud), or lose sleep over some minute detail about train schedules (alibis!), or fly-larvae gestation cycles (time of death!), or winged dragons vs. non (relative military power!). Just make your character do “X,” a helpful friend will say, but it is impossible, during the act of writing, to “make” one’s characters do anything if they are real to you — harder, in fact, than it is to get actual humans to do things.

The book includes specific references to Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, but you don’t have to have read the series to enjoy Daemon Voices (I hadn’t, when I read Daemon Voices, ever even cracked The Golden

Compass). There are chapters specifically about how one writes stories, with advice in a humble, even gentle, tone that feels more like he’s sitting across from you in a living room rather than standing on a dais. Some of the chapters go into specific inspirations, like Paradise Lost or William Blake, or the chapter “The Origin of the Universe,” which was written as a response to a Stephen Hawking lecture.

Daemon Voices is, in some ways, Pullman’s creative diary. It reads as if you’re having a highly illuminating conversation with a genius about how the storytelling sausage is made. It’s a portrait of a writer turned inside out, and anyone involved in the same endeavor will feel slightly less insane for having read it. — Tantri Wija