Les conseils de Robert Silverberg

[jerome]

Robert Silverberg a répondu sur le net à la question : "What's the best writing advice you ever received and who gave it to you?"

Voici le début de sa réponse. En dessous vous trouverez les réponses de Mike Resnick, Gene Wolfe, Paul J.McAuley, Ben Bova, Kage Baker, Walter Jon Williams, James Patrick Kelly...

Robert Silverbeg donc :

"The best piece of advice I ever got came from Lester del Rey, the veteran writer and editor who, when I was in my twenties, had become a sort of Dutch uncle, or perhaps even a second father, to me. At the beginning of my career in the mid-1950s I had trouble selling my most ambitious stories, the ones that I thought were the best in me, whereas the minor, more conventional pieces sold quite easily to the magazines. There were several reasons for this. The main one was that I was competing for slots in those magazines with the likes of Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, Alfred Bester, Damon Knight, C.M. Kornbluth, and other greats of that golden era for the science-fiction short story. What I was writing, at the age of 21 or 22, might have been ambitious but it still wasn't in a class with what those more mature writers were doing. On the other hand, all the magazines, even the top ones, were constantly in need of conventional 5000-worders for the back of the book. It seemed to make more sense to me to churn out competent potboilers for those magazine editors instead of trying to knock Sturgeon or Leiber or Knight out of the top place in the issue, and very shortly I was earning a nice living indeed writing formula fiction at a fast pace. (I was, in fact, earning more per year than any of my literary heroes by the third year of my career.) By playing it safe this way I was indeed able to pay the monthly rent, and then some. But I wasn't contributing anything worthwhile to science fiction, and, though I didn't realize it just yet, I wasn't even acting in my own best interests. "

La suite est ici

[Fred Combo]

Le meilleur conseil, à mon avis, c'est celui que Joe Lansdale a donné à P. Mac Auley : 'Put your ass in the chair and write.'

Il me semble que Heinlein disait la même chose.

Celui que le père de Larry Niven lui a donné n'est pas mal non plus : ""The best advice I was ever given was by my father. He took me aside on my 21st birthday and said, "Son, here's a million dollars. Don't lose it."