lazarus wrote: > On Thu, 8 Jul 2004 12:02:02 -0700 (PDT), you wrote: > > >> >>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. > > > I don't know the specific writers well enough to judge them, but some > of the writers I /am/ familiar with that follow the same pattern may > also run into the Success Bug. They get too big and successful to be > edited, basically, so their writing goes downhill. > > Once you buy into your own hype, you run a serious risk of becoming a > parody of yourself. (Most specifically, see Tom Clancy for an > example.) > > Yeah, that sort of thing happens in a lot of fields, not just writing... particularly creative endeavors seem to be this way. Van Halen is one of my favorite examples of this, though there are many that may be better. Eddie Van Halen was once considered (by some of us that didn't really know better) to be the greatest rock guitar player ever. Certainly he at least popularized many signifigant techniques for rock guitar, but the greatest ever was too much of an exaggeration. Still, he seems to have gotten to the point where noone will tell him "no, that's probably not a good idea". Does anyone here besides me read David Drake? I ask this because I'm curious if there is a consensus on the pattern of the quality of his writing ... ever since he wrote Redliners and apparently purged some of what was still eating at him after 'Nam, I've been told by people who are not big fans that they like his writing more. So I'm curious about that, with regards to this discussion. Derrill