Harlan Ellison – HuffPost 8.13.13

Mike Ragogna: Harlan, there are so many that feel that you’ve been doing the job extremely well, I hope you really do know that. So what advice do you have for new writers?

Harlan Ellison: It’s a tough road for writers these days. The word is not respected as much as it was. Things like the internet and iPods and tweeting have made vocabulary almost arcane. It’s as if you were starting from scractch and scratching out your words on Phoenician stone tablets. I urge anybody who really has the stuff and really is a writer to keep persevering. If it’s good, it will get published. When newspapers fail and magazines fail and there’s nothing left but a blank screen to look at, then we will all vanish the way the great Chinese artisans vanished. We can’t reproduce the specific blue that the Egyptians did or the oranges of the Chinese painters because when that art is lost, then we will be lost. But until that time, the storyteller is still the one who keeps the light going around the campfire.

MR: What advice might you have for those writers especially pursuing “sci-fi,” even though you’ve written for many genres?

HE: Well… there’s one of those “wells.” Judge Judy says, “‘Well’ is not an answer!” “Well” is a comment, a lub-dub of the heart, a systole-diastole of waiting to try and figure something out. I don’t know the answers any more than Archimedes did. I don’t know the answer to that question.