Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Dying for Tomorrow by Michael Moorcock Michael Moorcock: Death Is No Obstacle
Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Dying for Tomorrow by Michael Moorcock Michael Moorcock: Death Is No Obstacle. When John Steinbeck was once asked how he went about writing, he replied, ‘With a pencil.’ Some writers are reluctant to give away too much about their inspiration, their influences, their thinking and writing and editing processes, as if wanting to perpetuate the Romantic fallacy that genius and inspiration just strike and that the lucky, ‘gifted’ individual is driven to pick up a pen and write down what the Muse dictates. Despite his prodigious gifts and his long-standing success as a novelist, Michael Moorcock is only too happy to share the secrets of his craft. In a 1992 book, Death Is No Obstacle , which is essentially a long transcript of interviews the writer Colin Greenland had with Moorcock in 1990, Moorcock happily reveals some of the ‘tricks of the trade’ of writing genre fiction, as well as thoughtfully exploring his own relationship with various genres of popular fiction. The book isn’t easy to get hold of – copies tend to go for around £50 online. I’m indebted to my university library, which owns a signed copy. In a previous post on Interesting Literature , I’ve outlined some of Moorcock’s top tips for writing a genre novel in a matter of days, which are taken from the first chapter of Death Is No Obstacle . The rest of the book covers, in order, comedy and science fiction (including a revealing discussion about Moorcock’s own self-confessed failure to write straight science fiction, partly because he has no great love for much mid-century SF), comic strips and commedia dell’Arte, didactic fiction (featuring Behold the Man , Moorcock’s remarkable novel about a time traveller who ends up living in the time of the Crucifixion), non-linear fiction, where it went wrong (featuring, perhaps surprisingly, a discussion of the ‘failure’ of Gloriana ), and imitating and remodelling (Conrad et al).
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