From the viewpoint of the writer, the most significant aspect of fantasy and science fiction is that stories of these kinds are either set in imaginary worlds or feature the appearance in the familiar world of some imaginary entity.
The familiar mood that awaits the sensitive young who are poor and dispossessed is a mood of sharp and painful inferiority, of violently angry tensions, of desperate and overwhelming longings.
If you read a story with an 'I' or a 'he' or a 'she,' you're in familiar territory - but 'we' is mostly unexplored. I think of 'we' as an adventure.
The single best piece of advice I give to aspiring writers is to always write about things that they know. I suggest that they write about people and places and events and conflicts they are familiar with. That way their writing will be real and hopefully readers will respond to it. I try to take my own advice.
It is often said that definitions of Islamic government are imprecise. To me, however, they seemed to have a clarity that was completely familiar and also, it must be said, far from reassuring.
I think in my life I have so many things that changed so much with work and my career, and I don't really get to plan out a lot of my days. So when I have something that's familiar - just something that's there - I don't really like to switch it up.
Email is familiar. It's comfortable. It's easy to use. But it might just be the biggest killer of time and productivity in the office today.
I haven't read Ibsen, Shaw, Shakespeare - except 'The Merchant of Venice' in ninth grade. I'm not familiar with 'Death of a Salesman.' I haven't read Tennessee Williams.
