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even for the magazines, you know there are going to be anthologizations, there are going to be collections and so on. You can afford to take your time and do a little better, because you know that there's going to be considerably more money involved than just that initial sale. |
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Gunn: In my own case I am convinced that the harder I work on something the more successful it eventually is. That isn't universal in all cases, but it generally pays off today to do as good a job of writing as you can, irrespective of how long it takes. |
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Gunn: To get back to the fact that the mystery may be your mode of writing fiction, perhaps this develops rather naturally from the fact that your writing generally shows the triumph of reason or the struggle of reason to triumph over various kinds of circumstances including emotional reactions to situations that are existing. So that, if this is true, if reason is going to eventually emerge triumphant, the mystery is the natural form in which it will be exercised. Does that make sense to you? |
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Gunn: The solution to problems is the way in which reason demonstrates its desirability. |
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A.: Yes, it does make sense. And it reminds me that my villains generally are as rational as my heroes. In other words, it's not even a triumph of rationality over irrationality or over emotion, at least not in my favorite stories. It's generally the conflict between rationalities and the superior winning. The good guys, so to speak. In other words, if it were a western where everything depended upon the draw of the gun, then it would be very unsatisfactory if the hero shot down a person who didn't know how to shoot. In fact . . . |
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Gunn: It has to be an equal balance. |
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A.: That's right, where the measure of superiority is very small, where there is some question as to whether the hero will win. And occasionally, very occasionally, I have the side win in whom I don't believe, in other words there is a story I wrote called . . . oh, hell, what's the story called? . . . ''In a Good Cause," that's it. . . . "In a Good Cause," where the person who at the very end wins out is the person whom I consider the villain. What happened was that as I wrote the story, the winding paths of rationality made him win out against my will. (Laughter) Doesn't often happen; generally I'm in better control and the side I favor wins. |
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Gunn: It seems to me also that your fact articles, your science articles, are often written the same way your fiction is. You present a mystery. How did this happen, how did somebody come to this conclusion? And |
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