What I couldn’t help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I’d learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.

Pullman contrasts two kinds of literary knowledge: the abstract, evaluative understanding gained through criticism and the practical, embodied understanding gained through making. The remark suggests that the act of writing—even a single page—forces a confrontation with problems of voice, structure, pacing, and character that criticism can describe but not fully internalize. Implicitly, he argues for craft as a form of inquiry: composition becomes a laboratory in which the novelist learns what a novel is by attempting to build one. The quote also carries a gentle skepticism toward purely theoretical authority, privileging experience and practice over commentary.