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On the best writers

The stuff that writers come up with is insane. These guys can take a character and do what they please with it. They make characters so real, so well realized that real life seems pale by comparison. The best writers all have this quality. They have this quality of prose, the way they write, they compel you to read, to invest yourself in the characters, the story. The pages become more than a picture can show, more than the best movie can capture, indeed each page takes on a life of its own. Robert Kirkman does this as well as anyone, develops characters but keeps them ambiguous as well so they can do anything at any point of time. Margaret Atwood could write about someone eating shit and it'd still come out like poetry. Douglas Adams and Wodehouse have such a profound sense of humour, you could read a page of theirs and think about how they wrote it and nobody could figure out how they did it. I mean it took ages for people to realize that Wodehouse was a great writer. What do you say about Neil Gaiman, an author with an imagination so profound that nobody else comes even remotely close to what he does. Graphic novels, novels, short stories, any genre bring it on, Neil Gaiman could probably fuck each of those in the ass, live to talk about it and be rolling with money by the end of it all.

Ponder upon this, movies constantly seem dated, Star Wars effects must have seemed cool at the time but they are nothing in comparison to what we can do now, music of the earlier era seems badly produced but you read something and you cannot possibly say which era it came from. A science fiction book written in the 1950s could be as prescient now as it was back then. Childhood’s End with its treatment of the overlords seems as good today as it must have in 1950s. To kill a mocking bird is still as powerful a story as it was then. Harry Potter will continue to fascinate all for a long time to come. Indeed movies may grow old but books seldom age and survive generations.

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