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Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling · 10 of 12
Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling
writing HIGH

Pullman's Rules of Thumb

Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling Philip Pullman
heuristics craft-tools opening suspense plot

Key Principle

Pullman's heuristics are "tendencies, not laws — shading off into the fatuous at one end and the numinous at the other" (Essay: "Let's Write It in Red"). They are not commandments. Each one rests on a causal claim about what a story actually does; obeying the heuristic without understanding the claim turns advice into superstition.

"No rules, no freedom." (Essay: "Let's Write It in Red")

The deeper principle: rules are the armature imagination pushes against. Strip them out and play collapses ("you can't pretend a new thing without telling the others"). Restriction is the condition of imagination, not its enemy.

The Heuristics

Opening

  • Choose the opening moment knowing it commits a phase space. Every first sentence opens some futures and closes others. (Essay: "Let's Write It in Red")
  • Don't begin with a pronoun. "She stood at the window..." — who? Ambiguous reference squanders the opening commitment. (Essay: "Let's Write It in Red")
  • The opening commits moral allegiance. The reader sides with whoever they meet first (Hitchcock's burglar example). Paradise Lost begins in hell with the fallen angels — therefore "This is a story about devils. It's not a story about God." (Essay: "Paradise Lost")
  • Engage sympathy early; you cannot recover it once lost. (Essay: "The Writing of Stories")

Tension and Pacing

  • Surprise vs. suspense. Surprise: something happens you don't expect (body falls from cupboard). Suspense: something doesn't happen that you do expect (you know there's a body in some cupboard). Suspense escalates by deferral; surprise discharges in one beat. (Essay: "Let's Write It in Red")
  • Cliffhanger closure: a section-end must charge the forthcoming pause with tension. Conan Doyle ends Episode 1 of Hound of the Baskervilles with "the footprints of a gigantic hound!"; Milton ends Book II with Satan glimpsing the pendant world "full fraught with mischievous revenge." (Essay: "Paradise Lost")
  • Foreknowledge survives suspense. We know de Gaulle survived Day of the Jackal, but we still want to know how the attempt failed. The reader's hunger for mechanism makes "everyone knows what happens" no obstacle.
  • Raymond Chandler's surprise principle: "When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand." The value isn't the intruder — it's that "you, the storyteller, didn't know about it in advance." (Essay: "The Writing of Stories")

Plot Structure

  • Three Laws of the Quest: the task must be (1) hard to do, (2) easy to understand, (3) much hanging on outcome. (Essay: "Let's Write It in Red")
  • The path through the wood must have a destination; design every twist toward it. (Essay: "Let's Write It in Red")
  • Don't fudge the ending. (Essay: "Let's Write It in Red")
  • Whatever doesn't add, subtracts. Every element either advances the path or weakens it. (Essay: "Let's Write It in Red")
  • Leave loose ends. Long narratives can't be fully planned; the writer leaves optionality lying around so the story can resolve itself in ways the writer couldn't foresee. Witches' separation from daemons was set up as picturesque early, retrofitted later as the survival mechanism for Lyra and Will. (Essay: "The Writing of Stories")
  • Triangle test (Allan Dwan): plot characters as dots; check every character hooks into triangles. A "dangling" character without sufficient relation is a distraction — connect or cut. (Essay: "Let's Write It in Red")
  • Significance test for inventions: every imagined element must mean something or it becomes decoration. Apply at every level: characters, props, settings. (Essay: "Heinrich von Kleist" / "The Path Through the Wood")

Voice and Prose

  • Consistency of kind and of tone. Within a story certain moves are forbidden by the story's internal logic — not by external rulebook. Ransome would never put fairy dust on Wild Cat Island. (Essay: "Let's Write It in Red")
  • The pluperfect is the wrong tense for stories. (Essay: "Let's Write It in Red")
  • Use the present tense sparingly: "a vertical slice across a horizontal life." (Essay: "Let's Write It in Red")
  • Don't be afraid of the obvious. Avoidance of obvious moves — to escape being mistaken for a bad writer — is the bad writer's tell. Iorek is king of the bears in exile (obvious, right); Asriel and Coulter are actually Lyra's parents (obvious, right). "The bullshit detector is a good servant but a bad master." (Essay: "Let's Write It in Red")
  • Plain telling is the hardest test. "Just tell it normally" (Hawks). Drawing the model from an unusual angle is easier because viewers can't tell if the knees are wrong. Stream-of-consciousness, unreliable narrators, second person — often disguise weakness. "If you can't draw with the lead pencil, you won't be able to draw with the red one." (Essay: "Let's Write It in Red")
  • Sometimes leave things out — omission can intensify. Trollope refusing the Proudie bedroom. (Essay: "Let's Write It in Red")

Research and Source

  • The magpie method: non-academic research — flitting between subjects, hoarding irrelevant scraps, inventing contexts later — works because fiction needs the texture of found particulars that purposive research never turns up. (Essay: "Dreaming of Spires")
  • Opportunistic place-reading: real geography supplies emotional fuel only when the writer reads its hidden character. Major payoffs are generated by paragraph-level need, not by outline. (Essay: "Dreaming of Spires")
  • Read like a butterfly, write like a bee. Sample broadly, convert in solitude. (Essay: "I Must Create a System...")

Compositional Sequence

  • Atmosphere first, theme last. "Begin in delight, end in truth. But if you start with what you think is truth, you'll seldom end up with delight — it doesn't work that way round. You have to start with fun." (Essay: "The Firework-Maker's Daughter on Stage")
  • Theme is discovered, not imposed. Pullman discovered his trilogy's theme by noticing what was already in his draft (children's daemons shift, adults' don't). (Essay: "The Writing of Stories")
  • Voice is discovered, not chosen. Fighting your material to impose a chosen style is wasted labour. Accept the voice the story wants. (Essay: "Intention")

Character and Moral Grammar

  • Good/bad actions, not good/bad characters. Track moral weight of acts, refuse moral labels for people. Trains the reader to treat fiction the way they should treat life. (Essay: "Intention")
  • Action ↔ character. Actions both spring from and shape character; show the loop. (Essay: "Balloon Debate")
  • Show consequences. "Whatever we depict in our stories, we should show that actions have consequences." Moral seriousness lives in showing consequence, not in avoiding subject matter. (Essay: "Magic Carpets")

Audience

  • The marketplace as Rawlsian original position. A mixed audience on a carpet that can leave at will = the veil of ignorance applied to writing. Forces craft choices that work for everyone. (Essay: "Children's Literature Without Borders")
  • Don't condescend; don't make insider jokes. Both exclude.
  • Don't interpret; relate. Singer: "Events themselves are wiser than any commentary on them."
  • Limpid clarity (windowpane prose). Any opacity excludes part of the crowd. (Essay: "Children's Literature Without Borders")

Diagnostic

  • The stocking test: one accessory will betray your metaphysics. (Essay: "The Republic of Heaven")
  • The empty-counter test: if removing a word loses nothing, it was lying. (Essay: "God and Dust")
  • Embarrassment as diagnostic: when you wince at what you've invented, that wince is data. (Essay: "Writing Fantasy Realistically")
  • No-witness test: ask of any narrated scene — who could have told this? A passage with no possible witness is a fictional intrusion. (Essay: "The Story of the Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ")
  • Copernican move: when defending a position requires "epicyclic explanations... more and more complicated, more and more ridiculous," the foundational claim may be wrong. Re-centre the model, and the ingenuities vanish. (Essay: "God and Dust")
  • Symbolic-coincidence test: if removing a coincidence would also remove the meaning, keep it. Otherwise it's contrivance. (Essay: "Oliver Twist")
  • Landscape test for private mythology: a real system feels like "seeing part of a real landscape through a window, and knowing that however far you moved... there would always be more landscape to see." A fake feels like a painted backdrop with bare wall beyond it. (Essay: "I Must Create a System...")

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