Reflections: On the Magic of Writing

Reflections: On the Magic of Writing

Diana Wynne Jones

Language: English

Pages: 400

ISBN: 0062219898

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


This collection of more than twenty-five critical essays, speeches, and biographical pieces chosen by Diana Wynne Jones before her death in 2011 is essential reading for the author's many fans and for students and teachers of the fantasy genre and creative writing in general. The volume includes insightful literary criticism alongside autobiographical anecdotes, revelations about the origins of the author's books, and reflections about the life of an author and the value of writing for young people.

Reflections features the author's final interview, a foreword by award-winning author Neil Gaiman, and an introduction by Charlie Butler, a senior lecturer in English at the University of West England in Bristol.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

will not come,” I shake my head and mutter about perfidious Albion. Tolkien, as a Welsh scholar, may have had this reaction of mine in mind too. Certainly he is once again performing one of his sleights-of-narrative: for the thing at the back of his mind must certainly have been the way the Saxon King Harold had to march north to fight one invasion force in 1066, before rushing south again to fight the Normans, who were the real threat. Again, there is no need for the reader to know this. It

knowing when not to speak. Then there is her magic. No one does magic like Diana Wynne Jones. In the course of her books she runs the gamut of magical styles, and demonstrates that she knows quite a frightening amount about the technicalities, too. She has a sure instinct for the way magic works: totem magic, social magic, transformation magic, and the rest. Some of her spells are grand, formal affairs, like the climax of The Merlin Conspiracy. Others are casual, like the way Sophie in Howl’s

names of the perpetrators. If old, she will then die, thus saving you from having to take her along and feed her from your dwindling provisions; if a novice, she will either die also, or else prove not to be as nunnish as you thought. MONASTERIES are thick stone buildings on a steep hill. They are full of passages, cloisters, and tiny cells, all with no heating, and inhabited by monks who are mostly elderly and austere, some rather addled in their wits. At the head of the monastery there will

lies behind quite a lot of the Californian quest stories and any modern Pre-Raphaelitism (which is still alive too, and living in California, where writers make romantic stories about elves and mist and dim blowings and things) and it is, of course, a romantic poem. I never could work out whether the person or persons who wrote it knew what they were doing or not. At any rate, the reason I found it such a revelation was that it was the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, which is the kind of story you

parents; I was too ashamed. But I did tell them, because I enjoyed it so, how the matron marched us in line every Saturday to the cinema to see every film that happened to be showing. This philistine practice horrified them. I was removed and sent by bus to a Quaker school in Saffron Walden as a day pupil instead. I was there from 1946 to 1952. It was mainly a boarding school, which meant that I, and later my sisters, were as usual part of an oddball minority. Quakers do not believe in

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