Daemon Voices at the Halfway Mark
I’m halfway through Philip Pullman’s magnificent collection “Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling” and I can highly recommend it for anyone who works in the world of story. Pullman discusses story in a way that applies both to novels and filmmaking, and draws a lot of inspiration from the way filmmakers think of story.
A few of my favorite quotes from the first half of the book…
no work can be truly great if it is not about ourselves, and unless it tells us what it is like to be alive.
On what readers/viewers want from a story…
Readers–especially an audience that includes young readers–aren’t in the least interested in you, and your self-conscious post-modernist anguish about all the things there are to be anguished about when it comes to text. They want to know what happened next. So tell them. And the way to do that, the way to tell a story…is to think of some interesting events, put them in the right order to make clear the connections between them, and recount them as clearly as you can.
On the three laws of the Quest…
The protagonist’s task must be hard to do, it must be easy to understand, and a great deal must hang on the outcome…
A quote from Ernst Gombrich, which I think has strong parallels to the language of cinema…
Our language favours this twilight region between the literal and the metaphorical. Who can always tell where the one begins and the other ends?