I suspect that authors who start their careers writing for an adult audience - and who eventually produce a young adult novel or two - are more common than authors who begin by writing for young adults and who then gravitate toward composing something for an adult audience.

Paul Di Filippo

Categorized in : Start Something Writing Young

As many authors have said, if the writer is not surprised by events, then chances are that the reader will not be either, and grow bored.

Paul Di Filippo

bored events chance

That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding.

Paul Di Filippo

asking writing trying

What had happened was this. When still young, I had gotten the idea from somewhere that I might be able to write... Maybe the deadly notion came from liking to read so much. Maybe I was in love with the image of being a writer. Whatever. It had been a really bad idea. Because I couldn't write, at least not by the bluntly and frequently expressed standards of anyone in a position to offer any encouragement and feedback.

Paul Di Filippo

encouragement writing ideas

The clock indicates the moment-but what does eternity indicate?

Paul Di Filippo

philosophy history art

Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.

Paul Di Filippo

crazy safe fiction

The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate.

Paul Di Filippo

tone emotional hot

Its a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.

Paul Di Filippo

dystopian-fiction race literature

Immensely clever and libidinously hilarious.The most astonishing thing about Love in a Dead Language is its ingenious construction. Insofar as any printed volume can lay claim to being a multimedia work, this book earns that distinction.

Paul Di Filippo

language clever book

Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image.

Paul Di Filippo

subtext genre generations

The three touchstones that woke Buddha up - sickness, old age, and death - are a pretty good place to start when crafting a tragic tale. And if we need to get more specific: heartbreak, destruction, miscomprehension, natural disasters, betrayal, and the waste of human potential.

Paul Di Filippo

good old-age age death

Certainly the highest posthumous praise that can be conferred upon any writer is the assertion that his or her writing permanently altered the literary landscape for the better, opening new textual doors and engaging new readers. That the author's oeuvre was essential and irreplaceable and transformative.

Paul Di Filippo

new better writing doors

Any debut novel is usually a case of spitting into the wind - or, just maybe, casting your bread upon the waters. Without an established audience in place, first-time authors have to hope for resonant word of mouth and a receptive reviewer or three.

Paul Di Filippo

your place hope wind

Every Luke Skywalker needs his Darth Vader.

Paul Di Filippo

darth-vader his every needs

Thomas Pynchon surely inaugurated or crystallized a new genre in 1963 when he published 'V.' The seriocomic mystery or thriller with one foot set in the present and one in various historical eras received its postmodern baptism from Pynchon.

Paul Di Filippo

present new mystery historical

You could engineer a human to survive the greenhouse effect because you think that's what's going to happen, and then all of a sudden the glaciers are creeping down on you.

Paul Di Filippo

survive down think you

Science offers no brief for the telekinetic powers of Darth Vader and hardly any greater justification for the faster-than-light travel that makes his empire possible. And yet what is 'Star Wars' if not pure quill SF?

Paul Di Filippo

possible pure science travel

Everyone can guess what 'Corn Flakes' tastes like, even if you've never had them. But what, pray tell, does 'High School Musical' or 'Spider-Man' cereal possibly taste like? In this late era, we have reached the ultimate deracination between product image and what actually sits on our spoon.

Paul Di Filippo

never you high-school school

Only a minority of science fiction dystopias attempt to plumb the real existential roots of oppression, the flaws in humanity's nature that undermine our best attempts at organizing ourselves into social units.

Paul Di Filippo

best nature humanity science

Writers begin changing the instant they append 'The End' to a novel. Readers begin changing the moment they encounter that same phrase. And even the novels themselves, through the strange transmutations of time and shifting tastes and mores, exhibit changes as we look backward upon them, acquiring retroactive meanings and tonalities.

Paul Di Filippo

end look moment time

The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition. Globe-trotting Hemingways and brawling Christopher Marlowes are the exception, not the rule.

Paul Di Filippo

rule even great composition