On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Casey Rousseau wrote: > Steve blogged: > >I think I write gooder now than I usta did. > > Well, I hope so. Imagine how you'd feel if after twenty years of > writing for a living you hadn't improved at all. It's not clear to me that this expectation is generally justified. I suspect that in SF it's rarer to see monotonically improving writing than a sharp improvement followed by a slow decline. In poetry certainly people often just run out of experience to draw on (at least until they hit late old age). Why Silverberg or Zelazny (or LeGuin after say _The Dispossesed_; or Wolfe after the New Sun; or...) peaked early I can't say. Maybe something about ambition and careers and life.