--- Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> 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. Hm. I think _Malafrena_ and _Always Coming Home_ are as good as anything Le Guin wrote earlier, and I like _The Other Wind_ as much as any of the earlier Earthsea books. As for Wolfe, _Citadel of the Autarch_ was published the year he turned 52; I don't know whether that counts as peaking early. Maybe because it was only fifteen years after he published his first story? I agree that the New Sun is his peak so far, but I'd say any decline after that has been *very* slow (not counting _The Urth of the New Sun_, that disaster). > Maybe something about ambition and careers and life. I suspect so. On rasfw, though (as many here know), it's attributed to the Brain Eater. Department of Bizarrerie: The poet John Logan, in one of the _Naked Poetry_ anthologies (iirc), said that so many poets die or go crazy or stop writing poetry around the age of 35 because in their "body of work" they're symbolically recreating the body of their parent of the opposite sex, and halfway through their lives they're halfway done with the body, which means they've gotten to a part they can't face. I suppose part of this may have been true of Sylvia Plath, anyway. Jerry Friedman has written very little poetry since the age of 37. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail