There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.
The reason for that is that in adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult writers who deal in straightforward stories ( Read more... )

Allegory has to rely on a precise one-to-one relationship between story-element and meaning. A novel is more democratic: the meaning is not dictated or determined by the author, but is something that emerges in the space between the story and the reader's mind. Myth is a different matter. C.S. Lewis would say that a myth is a story that has the ( Read more... )

I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.

"...My true story’s too important for me to tell if you’re only going to believe half of it. So I promise to tell the truth, if you promise to believe." (The Amber Spyglass)

...No one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don't have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don't have to remain silent about it. You can ( Read more... )

The people in books told me things that the real people in my life either wouldn't admit or didn't realize I needed to know in the first place. And the more I read, the more I thought about writing my own stories, with my own kinds of truth in them. By the time I was nine, I knew I wanted to write. But I didn't tell anyone, because it was too wild ( Read more... )

"...I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are..." (The Amber Spyglass)

I don't know about this business of writing 'for' this audience or that one ... it shuts out more readers than it includes. If I think of my audience at all, I think of a group that includes adults, children, male, female, old, middle-aged, young - everyone who can read. If horses, dogs, cats or pigeons could read, they'd be welcome to it as

Books which satisfy us and feed us and nourish us have to have this substratum of genuine truth in them.

Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.