Is there anything that narrative can teach us about human nature? Literary theory would say no, because there is no such thing as human nature in the first place.

But every time I go to my native city of Norwich I make a sentimental pilgrimage to a tomb in the church of St Peter Mancroft, which I think says the contrary.

It is the tomb of a young woman. The inscription reads: “This Stone is dedicated to the Talents and Virtues of Sophia Ann Goddard, who died March 15 1801 aged 25. The Former shone with superior Lustre and Effect in the great School of Morals, the THEATRE, while the Latter informed the private Circle of Life with Sentiment, Taste, and Manners that still live in the Memory of Friendship and Affection.”

I don’t know any more about Miss Goddard than her epitaph tells us, but clearly she was greatly loved and admired.

And you can see what I’m going to focus on. The great School of Morals, the THEATRE — it’s not easy to imagine anyone using a phrase like that today, without irony. It belongs to a particular time in the history of the theatre, and by extension in the history of fiction and narrative generally. It is exactly contemporary with Jane Austen’s famous comment about the novel in Northanger Abbey: that it’s a work in which you find “the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties”. Audiences and readers at that period saw narrative as a proper vehicle for moral enlightenment, for instruction as well as delight. The Puritans who closed the theatres down 150 years before Sophia Goddard died would have had a quite different view.

Or perhaps not all that different. They, too, took seriously the idea that narrative art had a true and meaningful connection with human life. They took for granted that the behaviour of human beings could be depicted faithfully in stories, and that stories could have a moral effect, whether good or bad, and an emotional and intellectual effect, for that matter, on those who read them.

As a matter of fact, so do I. Together with pretty well everyone else who has ever read a book, I find that an entirely natural way of reading. But nature — human nature especially — is what we have made ourselves as well as what we were given to start with, and culture, which includes both technology and narrative art, is the way we do the making. What we are now is partly a result of our remote ancestors’ mastery of fire, for example, which meant that they could migrate into colder regions and evolve different body shapes and skin colours to cope with different climatic conditions; and it is also partly the result of enjoying, and pondering on, and emulating — or avoiding — the models of human behaviour set out for us by Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and so on, not to mention the great fairytales, and passing on what wisdom we gain from it to our children.

But if we can gain a knowledge of human nature from reading, does such a knowledge help us when we write? Yes, but differently.

I spent a lot of time and effort when I was younger trying to write stories of a kind that I wasn’t good at. I tried to write the sort of thing that’s called literary fiction, and I didn’t do it at all well. And it was hard work – a particular kind of hard work. Now I’m not going to pretend that writing novels is ever easy, but I wasn’t enjoying it, either. Nor do I want to give the impression that every moment of a novelist’s life is a riot of happy fun; but something just wasn’t right at a basic level.

I didn’t realise what that was until I began to write His Dark Materials. Here was a story that — whether you call it fantasy or not — is at least non-everyday-realistic. And what I felt at that point was that I was coming home, that something in my nature leapt towards this way of imagining things, so that I felt a happy and confident ease when I wrote about dæmons and little people 6in high with poison spurs who ride on dragonflies. This was native to me in a way that realism, much as I’d have liked it to be, wasn’t.

In fact, the way I felt was very similar to what I’ve felt when carving wood. The wood might be straight-grained and free from knots, the chisel might be as sharp as dedicated honing can make it — but if you’re going against the grain, you’ll have an extra layer of difficulty to cope with. Turn the workpiece around and carve the other way, and the chisel will cut with nonchalant accuracy, and curls of smooth wood will obediently lift themselves from the surface.

You have to observe yourself closely and honestly, and see what you’re good at, and what you enjoy, and what you can do with the imagination you have. Some writers are like boxwood; their talent has a tight and perfectly uniform grain that cuts as happily in one direction as another, so they can turn from history to comedy to tragedy without faltering. Others are like construction softwood, coarse-textured, incapable of taking fine carving, easily splintered. They can do only one kind of rough structure, which may be very large, it may be strong and robust; but we’re talking about carpentry and nails rather than cabinet-making and dovetail joints.

But whatever your talent is, you have to discover its nature and go with the grain of it. Otherwise, not only will you be perpetually frustrated and dissatisfied, because making the will do the work of the imagination is a melancholy business, but the work you produce will not express the nature of what it’s made of. A jewel-box made of deal will be a poor jewel-box; and to make the joists under the floorboards of a house out of ebony is to waste the beauty of the wood.

So, finally, do you need a theory of human nature in order to write stories? I think you need a theory of your own nature. But that’s not easy to come by. You can spend years, for example, thinking that you’re interested in something, only to discover eventually that you were never really interested, you just thought you should be. Self-knowledge is hard won.

And when it comes to literary theories, the best model I’ve found is Schrödinger’s cat. This is the famous animal in the box, which is both alive and dead until you look at it. Steal theories, fool around with them, turn them inside out, see what they feel like, but don’t on any account become a slave to them. Be credulous and sceptical, both equally, both simultaneously. In order to write in a way that’s fully human, sometimes we need to be a little feline, too.

This is an extract from an address by the author to a symposium, “Literature, Science and Human Nature”, held at the ICA. The event was organised by the University of Surrey and sponsored by The Times