You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.
Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.
Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.
A science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, that would not have happened at all without its scientific content.
You must write to the people's expertise.
The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.
I teach writing courses and first of all, I teach my students what prosody is.
Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words.
There is no way of writing stories that I haven't done.
Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.
There are a lot of people who write very intensely about things they do not and cannot do.
I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that's what you do.
Writing is a communication.
You write a story about loneliness, and you grab them all because everybody's an expert on that one.