Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down.
They say every writer really just writes about one thing over and over. I guess my one thing is how the past impacts the present.
It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.
Novels taught me that history is dramatic. I wanted my students to know that, too.
I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.
Being a writer can be a very lonely profession, but having a network of people who can sympathize with everything you're going through - from contract issues to the terror of changing your novel from past- to present-tense - is an invaluable asset.
The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.
Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.
The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.
All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.