If I find that I keep thinking about an idea over months, or years, that’s an indicator to me that this is something I want to write about. TC: The ideas I wind up turning into stories are the ones I have been thinking about for a very long time. PP: You are very careful about which ideas you work with, for stories… How do you sift through the ideas and decide that this is the one you want to write about? “I do think that choosing the right point of view is an important part of figuring out a story and I usually have to figure out who is the right person to tell the story before I do any writing.” – Ted Chiang That was around the time I decided that I wanted to become a science fiction writer and his work definitely had a big role in that. Reading his Foundation trilogy and his Robot stories actually, I read a lot of his work when I was about 12. His work had an enormous influence on me. Usman T Malik (UTM): Or that made you want to be a writer? Pooja Pande (PP): What was the first story that you ever read, or writer you encountered, that made an impression on you? He also tells us why the dumb phone wasn’t such a bad piece of technology, after all. Papercuts presents a three-way conversation between Reportage Editor Pooja Pande, award-winning SF writer & long-time friend of DWL Usman T Malik and Ted Chiang, about all the folklore that lives within Science Fiction, the progressive storyline, and that writer’s quote that could change your life. All the SF glory possible – from the Nebulas to the Hugos – has been his, and yet he wears it all lightly.

But almost each time he’s unleashed a story upon the world with his peculiar kind of storytelling, which adapts itself according to the perspective it’s favourable to and pulls you in with its narrative power of immediacy, he’s won an award. American Science Fiction writer Ted Chiang is perhaps the antithesis to the prolific writer figure – having published only 14 short stories and novellas in his career thus far.

Chiang short stories