Philip Pullman tells a nice story about how he invented dæmons for use in His Dark Materials. 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.
When we tell our autobiographies, are we telling the story of the event itself, or the story of our remembering it? I’ve come to realise that memory is part invention: by making sense of the disconnected vestiges of our past, we turn them into something else, a new narrative that creates as much as it [...]
I love intrusive narrators. The more garrulous, interfering, self-conscious, the better. Intrusive narrators remind us that someone is telling this story, that the story does not exist without the telling.