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| Questions, comments or suggestions? Email me here. |
| So: why fantasy? It was because I wanted to describe certain events that didn't seem to belong in this world. As I began to see the story appearing ahead of me I saw how I could use it to say some things about a topic that's preoccupied me for a long tme - namely the difference between innocence and experience, or childhood and adulthood. But the images came first and the theme came later - it's never the other way round for me. Lyra's world is similar to ours, but different, because making up something entirely different wasn't interesting to me. I wanted to use it to show things about us and the way we live, so the closer it was, the better. Why a trilogy? Well, it could have been one long volume, but it was always going to be that length - about 1200 pages. Putting it in three volumes just made publishing and bookselling sense. Why did it take so long? Why did I withdraw my first version? Well, it's a long book. And I didn't. No such thing happened. I have heard all kinds of rumours - I had "writer's block", the publishers had withdrawn it for fear of the religious lobby, etc, etc. Not a word of truth in any of them. It took a long time because it was a long book and I wanted to get it right. That's all. How did I get Lyra's character? In a way it's not a mystery: I just sat down and thought of her. But I realise that doesn't explain all that much. Maybe it's hard for non-writers to understand that you don't actually have to base your characters on real people for them to seem real. And nor do you put them together out of this one's temper, that one's bravery, another's sense of humour, etc, as if they were a construction kit. It's more like perception. I just closed my eyes and there she was. I could see her and hear her. I'm very glad is she seems real to readers, but she was so real to me that it would have been odd if she didn't. Names of characters come in different ways. Sometimes they arrive already named, as Lyra did; sometimes you have to make them up. Lee Scoresby comes about from Lee Van Cleef, the actor who played with Clint Eastwood in the Dollar films of Sergio Leone, and William Scoresby, a real Arctic explorer. As for Serafina Pekkala, I got her name out of the Helsinki telephone directory, because I wanted a name that just sounded like a normal Finnish name. Apparently it does! |
| Phillip Pullman's Answers to Questions About The Creation of the characters, creatures, settings and more. On the Readerville forum These are just some related excerpts, for the complete text of Phillip Pullman's responses please email me. |
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