On this day… 6th October, 1950 – David Brin born
Glen David Brin (born October 6, 1950) is an American scientist and award-winning author of science fiction. His Campbell Award winning novel The Postman was adapted as a feature film and starred Kevin Costner in 1997. Brin’s nonfiction book The Transparent Society won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association and the McGannon Communication Award.
Advice On Writing
Though SF offers me the freedom I need to explore a world undergoing drama and change, I often tell writing students that their first work of fiction should be a murder mystery.
Oh, it can be a sci fi mystery, like my first novel, Sundiver. Or you might give it romance or set it in the wild west, or ancient Rome. What matters is that it should follow the plot patterns and revelatory structure of a mystery yarn.
Why? Because only mysteries demand total storytelling discipline. No distractions or arty styling or array of gimmicks can mask or make up for bad plotting. This all becomes apparent when the reader finds out who-dunnit in a mystery. In the end, the reader knows whether or not you cheated. And once you’ve had that lesson, you will never neglect it again.
Did You Know?
David earned a PHD in Astrophysics and had a succesful career as a Scientist before becoming a Sci-fi writer.
Literature was the first truly verifiably repeatable and effective form of magic. Picture how it must have impressed ancient people to look at marks — on papyrus or clay — and know they conveyed the words of scribes and kings long dead. Knowledge, wisdom and art could finally accumulate. Death was robbed some of its sting.
Writing still is magical. To create strings of black squiggles that millions of others skillfully de-code with just their eyes — into emotions and thoughts, or the struggles of believable characters, or spectacle beyond Hollywood’s wildest dreams.
Despite all of that, science and the honesty that it engenders have been our true accomplishments. I believe in a literature that explores this revolution, that presents alternatives and hard choices and that might help us to be wise about the onrushing process of change. One that helps to remind science and progress that it needs a heart. I reject the dichotomy, the notion that these things oppose each other. When a chance came along to combine the two? Who wouldn’t grab the opportunity? – See more at: http://www.davidbrin.com/faq.html#sthash.bg6MoK6f.dpuf
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