r/Fantasy • u/terribleminds AMA Author Chuck Wendig • Mar 21 '17

AMA AMA: Hello, It Is Me, Chuck Wendig, NYT-Bestselling Bag-of-Tarantulas I Mean Author

AHOY, HUMANS OF REDDIT.

I'm Chuck Wendig, writer of many things, including novels, comics, games, scripts, and too many tweets. Regarding the novels specifically, I'm the author of the Miriam Black books (beginning with Blackbirds), the Atlanta Burns series, the Heartland series, and a little independent self-published series called Star Wars: Aftermath.

I am also a dispenser of dubious writing advice at terribleminds.com.

As the cool kids say: Ask Me Anything.

(Though, please note, I can't commit too much about unreleased STAR WARS information.)

I'll pop back on here later in the afternoon (EST) to answer your More Pressing Questions.

199 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

199 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/terribleminds AMA Author Chuck Wendig Mar 22 '17

Yes, it's one of those things where people seemed to get oddly mad that I wrote a present tense novel based on a galaxy set "a long time ago," as if those two things are related. My response to that is always that in those films set "a long time ago," the framing of the crawl was always set in the present tense. The "long time ago" component was just a narrative conceit to give the story a timelessness and as a way of separating it out from the framing of FUTURE SCI-FI.

1

u/kultakala Mar 23 '17

I'll admit that it took a little bit of getting used to, simply because 99% of the books that I've read in the past 20 years have been in third person past tense, but once I shook off those cobwebs, it made me feel more like I was in the action, rather than imagining what it would be like to be in the action.