Beginning again
February 19th, 2009 | by Ben Hoare |Philip Pullman tells a nice story about how he invented dæmons for use in His Dark Materials:
“… it just emerged as I was trying to begin the story. I suddenly realised that Lyra had a dæmon, and it all grew out of that.”
(’The Man Behind the Magic: An Interview with Philip Pullman‘)
I like Pullman’s implication that he isn’t really the author of this story - that the details were something for him to realise rather than invent.
But this is also a story of beginning again. Pullman tried to begin the story without dæmons and it didn’t work, so he began again - this time, with the dæmon present: “Lyra and her dæmon moved through the darkening Hall.” It’s a compelling opening, and many would argue that dæmons are the most successful element of Pullman’s work. It seems important that dæmons were born when Pullman started again.
I tried a more self-conscious version of beginning again when rewriting ‘A Fantasy’, the followup to ‘A Cadence‘.
The original story started with a knight, Sir Drake, who fell in love with a princess. In my head, the story was all about this knight and whether or not his fantasies came true.
When I’d finished the drafts of all the stories in this collection, I realised that ‘A Fantasy’ was by far the weakest. It needed a lot of work. At first I thought this would be a case of a few tweaks, but after hiding from the story for about a year, I eventually decided that the whole thing needed to be rewritten.
Remembering Pullman’s story of regenesis, I tried to talk myself into a similar mindset. I asked myself what other elements were in the story that I was not seeing. Who else was there? In the end I “realised” that what I’d missed was the emphasis. In the first version of the story, the princess was objectified - she was something for Sir Drake to dream about obtaining. I wondered how the story would change if I made the princess an equal protagonist. What if it wasn’t just about Sir Drake’s fantasies, but about hers as well? What if the rich and healthy princess was just as scared of her very ordinary destiny?
Instantly, the story started to shift, and I can now see how ‘A Fantasy’ fits into the collection. In ‘A Cadence‘, the princes go on adventures while the ordinary people work on the land and think about what’s going on. The rich and famous people are clearly the protagonists, and the ordinary people are mere extras. What ‘A Fantasy’ now enables me to do is begin the transition from stories about extraordinary people (with mermaids and dragons) to tales about very ordinary people.
When we talk about storytelling, we put a lot of emphasis on beginnings. I agree that beginning is a great challenge and a real achievement. But perhaps even harder - and even more important - is the process of beginning again.
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