Reflections Read Free Page B

deal with the adventures and misadventures that can happen to authors engaged in the tasks attendant on the professional life of a children’s writer, such as making school visits. In Diana’s case, such visits were always potentially charged with danger, due to a notorious travel jinx.
    Another group of pieces focuses on Diana’s own work, either in general (“Creating the Experience,” “The Value of Learning Anglo-Saxon,” “Freedom to Write”) or else relating to specific works, as in “The Origins of The Merlin Conspiracy ” and “The Origins of Changeover .” “Two Kinds of Writing?” explains Diana’s move into writing for adults with A Sudden Wild Magic , and includes some surprising thoughts about the differences between children and adults as readers. “The Heroic Ideal: A Personal Odyssey” is her most extended piece of analytical self-criticism and is a fascinating account of the ingredients that went into the making of Fire and Hemlock . Ideally, it should be read in tandem with “Some Truths About Writing,” a partial palinode for the earlier piece, which provides an alternative approach to the perennial question of where ideas come from, from a writerly rather than an academic perspective.
    Apart from reviews Diana did not write much criticism of the work of others, but when she did so her major preoccupation was with the art of constructing and telling stories. “The Shape of the Narrative in The Lord of the Rings ” is a sharp analysis of Tolkien, partly inspired by attending his lectures on plot construction as a student in the 1950s, while another of her lecturers is the subject of “Reading C. S. Lewis’s Narnia.” “Inventing the Middle Ages” describes the storytelling techniques that fascinate her in writers of the medieval period, many of whom haunt her own fiction through their example. Her work as a reviewer is represented here by a review of Mervyn Peake’s Boy in Darkness .
    This book contains an interview Diana gave just a few weeks before her death. She was still very much interested in all the questions discussed in this volume, and still finding fresh ways to answer them. Besides its content, I hope that this interview captures something of how much fun a face-to-face conversation with Diana Wynne Jones could be.
    Finally, this collection includes pieces by two of Diana’s sons: an address given at her funeral ceremony, and a radio talk. Both show how her magical writings permeated and strengthened her family bonds. Together, the pieces in this book allow us to view Diana’s mind through various shades of enchanted glass and to enjoy its rare combinations of subtle thought and lucid expression, seriousness and humor, rootedness in the world and boundless imagination. They are not only valuable in themselves, but also serve as a vade mecum for anyone wishing to read—or perhaps reread—Diana Wynne Jones’s stories and novels. And that is a journey well worth taking.
    Â 
    â€”Charlie Butler

Preface
    I n 2009 I was told I had cancer. In 2010 I was told I had only a few months to live. Laura Cecil, who has been my agent ever since my first book for children was published, then felt it was time that we sorted out all my manuscripts in order to donate them to the archive Seven Stories. Since my handwritten first drafts often differ substantially from the printed book, she expected this would cast light on my working methods and so be of interest to future research.
    We set to work. (The amount of dust that accumulates upon papers stored for up to thirty years in an unopened drawer surprised us both.) We discovered many things, some of them very odd, and, among them, a pile of the various lectures, articles, and reviews I had written between 1978 and 2008. These were, quite accidentally, stored more or less in chronological order, and as I looked through them, I