Philip Pullman on Stories

Stories have to begin. Out of the welter of events and ideas and pictures and characters and voices that you experience in your head, you the storyteller must choose the start. You could begin anywhere in the chronology, of course; you could begin in the middle, in medias res, which is a soundly classical way to begin; but you do …

On plotting and planning

I am having a hard time with the book. Have enough paper written to make it complete, but must do all over again. I just didn’t know where I was going and when I got there I saw that I had come to the wrong place. That’s the hell of being the kind of writer who cannot plan anything, but …

A story is like a house

“A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, …