So, in that regard, you know, thinking about the tools of the internet, the possibilities of harnessing so many different voices via a social network, or so on, how do you feel about the concept of shared worlds and collaborative writing?
Um, it’s interesting. I think you can do some very different things with the internet that you couldn’t have done before. Everyone I’ve talked to who’s collaborated on a book has told me that collaborating is twice the work for half the money. And some people’s minds work pretty well that way; they work as a team. I mean, Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven obviously work very well as a team; some of their greatest fiction came when they worked together, and the internet can allow for some of that, but I’m also skeptical at the same time because I’ve seen…I don’t know. One of the things that’s great about novels, that you don’t get in other story-telling mediums—particularly you don’t get in television or movies, which is our dominant story-telling medium right now—is a single person’s vision, and that has its own foibles, and it has its own benefits, but when you read one of my books, you are reading my vision for a story. I may have gotten feedback on it, I may have had an editor tell me, “Hey, you should do this; you should do that,” but every word that gets changed is changed by me. Everything that happens is done by me. And reading about the movie industry, there’s some great movies that come out, but they’re hugely collaborative works, and it seems that sometimes that so many people getting their fingers in the pie makes a movie end up losing some of its magic and vision.
Of course not always—there are fantastic films—but some time if you want to have an interesting time, read the essay “ Building the Bomb “ by Terry Rossio. Terry Rossio is a famous screenwriter—he did the Pirates of the Caribbean movies; he did the Aladdin screenplay with his writing partner together—and he wrote a series of essays talking about the process, and this one is now like ten years old, but it talks about the creation of the Puppet Masters movie, the classic Heinlein novel turned into a movie—I think it’s The Puppet Masters ; it’s one of the Heinlein scripts—but he loved the book, and he adapted it, and it goes through, step-by-step, how the life got torn out of that script because of the different people who wanted to be part of the project, not for artistic reasons, but because they wanted their names attached to it, or they wanted this person involved, or they wanted that, and it can kinda scare you sometimes what happens. I’m shocked that the artists in Hollywood—the screenwriters and the visionary directors and cinematographers, and people—are actually able to get anything artistic created, considering how much they have to go through.
We aren’t. We don’t. I’m in Hollywood, so…
That’s one of the things that makes, I think, television, right now, a little bit better when it comes to writing than film is, it goes through fewer collaborative bubbles.
Television’s gotten great lately, comparing what we had in the 90s to what you have right now…Wow. It’s night and day.
Yeah.
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