Finding the grain of our talent

 I’m continuing to read through Philip Pullman’s Daemon Voices this week, and I’ve come to his talk ‘The Cat, the Chisel, and the Grave’.  In that piece, he talks about whether we need a theory of human nature in order to tell stories.  As a person who has never been academic, even though I have a string of degrees, I rolled my eyes at that.

But as I read on I realised the piece had a lot of interesting ideas.  “Maybe my writing hand has already decided what the story’s going to be” he says.  There are certainly times when the words have gushed out of me as I write a scene, revealing a piece of backstory or character history I was totally unaware of.

“The feeling I’m talking about… might come from the fact that. I’m being guided.” he says.  Yes, I’ve certainly felt on many occasions that the words which appeared on my page came from somewhere beyond me, that I was merely a channel for them.

“You should go with the grain and not against it,” he says, and then recounts that he spent a lot of time when he was younger trying to write literary fiction, and that he was not very good at it.  He says in other places in this collection of essays that he’s not a fan of fantasy.  In fact, he’s quite snobby about it.  And even in this essay he’s fighting the fact that His Dark Materials is fantasy.  

But whatever guides our writing will eventually have its way. “I felt that… I was coming home,” he says, “that something in my nature leaped towards this way of imagining things.”

We all need to get out of our own way and find that place where we fit. “It’s a place of feeling the grain of your talent and going with it, instead of against it,” he says.  “You have to… see what you’re good at, and what you enjoy.”

I totally agree, and that’s why I’ve doggedly stuck to writing SF over the years.  If I just wanted to be published, writing crime or romance would give me a much better chance.  But I’m not in love with those genres, and I am in love with SF.

Pullman says, “I think you need a theory of your own nature…  And I think you need the capacity to take other people's theories very lightly indeed.  Steal what you need…. but don’t whatever you do become a slave to them.”

And that’s the place I’ve now reached.  After years of being told that my characters should be in romantic relationships, that they should be this or that, I’m ignoring all others’ ideas about what my stories should be.  I’ve found the grain of my work, and I’m going with it.