When I started thinking about what I should say here, I was just finishing the final draft of a very complicated book. It was so complicated that I had to break my usual rule and make a chapter by chapter plan of parts of it. It was a relief to find that the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament was on and that I could stagger away from time to time and watch phut-phut-phut. In fact, it wasn’t a relief – it was a revelation. It dawned on me that tennis stars were perfect models of heroes – all kinds of heroes – folk tale, myth, comicbook, and above all modern fantasy. And I found myself attending closely and thinking very hard indeed.
For a start, they all had that larger-than-life quality. They stood out among other people even if you didn’t know that one was the star – and this is very like the way everyone follows the hero of a story, even if he or she is only designated The Prince, or The Youngest Sister. And though they defeated the villain on the opposite side of the net, they didn’t save the world, they simply won a tennis match. It is very unidiomatic to consider that a hero saves the world. What gives a hero his/her universality is the fact that the gods, or God, or the Fates, o
Diana Wynn Jones
About Author
DIANA WYNNE JONES was born in August in London, where she had a chaotic and unsettled childhood against the background of World War II. The family moved around a lot, finally settling in rural Essex. As children, Diana and her two sisters were deprived of a good, steady supply of books by a father, 'who could beat Scrooge in a meanness contest'. So, armed with a vivid imagination and an insatiable quest for good books to read, she decided that she would have to write them herself.
She was extremely dyslexic, so when she told her parents she wanted to be a writer, they just laughed. However between ages of 12 and 14, the young writer completed two epic tales scrawled in a total of 20 copy books. This taught her from an early age the invaluable lesson of how to finish a book.
Her higher education began in when she went up to St Anne's College Oxford, and attended lectures by CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein. It was here she met her husband, John A Burrow, who is Professor of English at Bristol University. They married in and have three sons.
She has written both children's books and plays (mostly performed at the London Arts Theatre) and her first boo
Summary
This collection of more than twenty-five critical essays, speeches, and biographical pieces chosen by Diana Wynne Jones before her death in 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.
I find it regrettable that I hadn’t read more of Diana Wynne Jones’ novels before reading Reflections: On the Magic of Writing. I’m a fan of hers, but perhaps not that good at being one. I’ve read Howl’s Moving Castle twice — which I find superior to the Studio Ghibli film — and about half of the sequel Castle in the Air, which I did not finish for reasons separate from the book itself. I’m also familiar with her book The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land, which I love for its jabs against the clichés and overused tropes found in the Fantasy genre. It’s a small amount of her work, but her writing always drew me in and I got a good sense of her style. This is what in
I think I write the kind of books I do because the world suddenly went mad when I was five years old. In late August , on a blistering hot day, my father loaded me and my three-year-old sister, Isobel, into a friend’s car and drove to my grandparents’ manse in Wales. "There’s going to be a war," he explained. He went straight back to London, where my mother was expecting her third baby any day. We were left in the austere company of Mam and Dad (as we were told to call them). Dad, who was a moderator of the Welsh Nonconformist Chapels, was a stately patriarch; Mam was a small browbeaten lady who seemed to us to have no character at all. We were told that she was famous in her youth for her copper hair, her wit, and her beauty, but we saw no sign of any of this.
Wales could not have been more different from our new house in Hadley Wood on the outskirts of London. It was all grey or very green and the houses were close together and dun-coloured. The river ran black with coal – and probably always had, long before the mines: they told me the name of the place meant "bridge over the river with the black voice." Above all, everybody spoke a foreign language. Sometimes we were taken
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