Nothing That Can Be, Can Come Between

There Did Not Have To Be A Moral. She Need Only Show Separate Minds, As Alive As Her Own, Struggling With The Idea That Other Minds Were Equally Alive. It Wasn't Only Wickedness And Scheming That Made People Unhappy, It Was Confusion And Misunderstanding, Above All, It Was The Failure To Grasp The Simple Truth That Other People Are As Real As You. And Only In A Story Could You Enter These Different Minds And Show How They Had An Equal Value. That Was The Only Moral A Story Need Have.

What Reader Wants To Be Told What Attitude To Strike?

There Was, In My View, An Unwritten Contract With The Reader That The Writer Must Honour. No Single Element Of An Imagined World Or Any Of Its Characters Should Be Allowed To Dissolve On An Authorial Whim. The Invented Had To Be As Solid And As Self-consistent As The Actual. This Was A Contract Founded On Mutual Trust.

And Though You Think The World Is At Your Feet, It Can Rise Up And Tread On You.

At The Back Of My Mind I Had A Sense Of Us Sitting About Waiting For Some Terrible Event, And Then I Would Remember That It Had Already Happened.