"This does make me very very careful, particularly in the second draft, to get it right, because you do feel that somebody in the future who may be extremely important for everybody, is going to have me behind them, and this is a responsibility, a huge one"
About this Quote
She’s talking about fantasy the way most people talk about policy: as something that will outlive you and quietly steer strangers. Diana Wynne Jones frames revision not as polishing prose but as moral labor. The “second draft” is where the fun of invention gives way to accountability, where a writer stops being dazzled by her own world and starts asking what it teaches when no one is watching.
The key move is her reversal of influence. It’s not “I will inspire someone important.” It’s “someone important… is going to have me behind them.” That phrasing makes authorship less a spotlight than a shadow cast forward. Subtext: stories are ideology in narrative clothing. If a future reader becomes a leader, a scientist, a parent, a voter, then the scaffolding of their imagination may include her metaphors, her moral shortcuts, her notions of heroism, class, cruelty, mercy. She’s wary of smuggling in lazy assumptions simply because they make a plot run smoothly.
Context matters here because Jones wrote for children and young adults, audiences often treated as aesthetically secondary and ethically “safe.” She rejects that condescension. Children’s literature, in her view, is precisely where the stakes are highest: formative, sticky, reread. The repetition of “very very” and the plainspoken “get it right” aren’t lack of sophistication; they’re a refusal to romanticize craft. She’s articulating a writer’s version of the Hippocratic oath: revision as the moment you admit your work can shape the future, then decide to deserve that power.
The key move is her reversal of influence. It’s not “I will inspire someone important.” It’s “someone important… is going to have me behind them.” That phrasing makes authorship less a spotlight than a shadow cast forward. Subtext: stories are ideology in narrative clothing. If a future reader becomes a leader, a scientist, a parent, a voter, then the scaffolding of their imagination may include her metaphors, her moral shortcuts, her notions of heroism, class, cruelty, mercy. She’s wary of smuggling in lazy assumptions simply because they make a plot run smoothly.
Context matters here because Jones wrote for children and young adults, audiences often treated as aesthetically secondary and ethically “safe.” She rejects that condescension. Children’s literature, in her view, is precisely where the stakes are highest: formative, sticky, reread. The repetition of “very very” and the plainspoken “get it right” aren’t lack of sophistication; they’re a refusal to romanticize craft. She’s articulating a writer’s version of the Hippocratic oath: revision as the moment you admit your work can shape the future, then decide to deserve that power.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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