Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Mahy

Mahy is sneaking a manifesto into what sounds like a modest craft note. She opens with the nuts and bolts - "style and event and character" - but the real move is the phrase "attitudes to". She is not listing techniques; she is naming stances, the emotional and ethical posture a writer takes toward narrative. Style isn't decoration, event isn't plot machinery, character isn't a puppet. They're lenses. Her point is that a writer's thinking changes when you start treating these elements as choices with consequences, not defaults you inherit from whatever you last read.

The second line lands like a dare: "I believe that all good writers are original". In children's literature, where Mahy did much of her most influential work, originality is often policed by gatekeepers in a contradictory way: demanded in marketing copy, discouraged in practice ("make it familiar, make it safe"). Mahy pushes back with a deceptively simple claim that reframes originality from a rare genius trait into a baseline of seriousness. If you're "good", you can't help but be original, because genuine attention to voice, character, and the shape of events forces you off the assembly line.

Subtextually, she's also dismantling the romantic myth of inspiration. Originality here is worked out, not magically received - the product of deliberate experimentation with how stories look, move, and feel. It's an argument for agency: your writing becomes yours when you develop a relationship to craft that's active, skeptical, and personal.