"And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?"
About this Quote
Pullman turns a craft headache into an existential one. The sentence lurches forward in a breathless, chatty tumble - "before I'd got to the end", "slap bang" - then hits the phrase "fundamental problem" like a curb. That pacing does what he is describing: storytelling as momentum suddenly arrested by a question you can't dodge. He frames it as something that "still troubles me today", a quiet flex that even a veteran novelist begins in uncertainty. The subtext is demystifying without trivializing: mastery doesn't eliminate the problem; it makes you more sensitive to it.
"Where am I telling it from?" sounds technical - point of view, distance, tense - but Pullman is also talking about moral position. In his fiction, especially the His Dark Materials universe, narration isn't a neutral camera; it's a set of choices about what can be known, what must be withheld, and whose reality gets to count. "Where" is geography, class, education, faith, species. It's also time: are we inside the child's astonishment, the adult's regret, the historian's cold summary?
Context matters: Pullman writes in a tradition (Auden to Milton to children's fantasy) that treats story as a vehicle for argument, not just entertainment. His line admits that the first paragraph isn't simply an opening; it's a contract. Pick the wrong vantage and the whole book tells on you. The irony is that the most basic question isn't "what happens?" but "from what angle does it become true?"
"Where am I telling it from?" sounds technical - point of view, distance, tense - but Pullman is also talking about moral position. In his fiction, especially the His Dark Materials universe, narration isn't a neutral camera; it's a set of choices about what can be known, what must be withheld, and whose reality gets to count. "Where" is geography, class, education, faith, species. It's also time: are we inside the child's astonishment, the adult's regret, the historian's cold summary?
Context matters: Pullman writes in a tradition (Auden to Milton to children's fantasy) that treats story as a vehicle for argument, not just entertainment. His line admits that the first paragraph isn't simply an opening; it's a contract. Pick the wrong vantage and the whole book tells on you. The irony is that the most basic question isn't "what happens?" but "from what angle does it become true?"
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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