But, on the most part, he belonged to the optimists; he felt that there would be time enough to suffer when catastrophe really struck.
I could give you some names of Workshop participants who are as good as many who are being published but haven't had the right editor recognize their merit or have not been adequately published.
I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.
I hope I'm still alive to see an expedition set off for Mars.
I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.
In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope.
It also is true that some ideas naturally work themselves out over a longer period of time than a single human life can encompass.
One should be willing to throw away a dozen ideas to come up with a good one, just as one should throw away a dozen words to come up with the right one.
Scientists do their best work when they are in their early years. Writers' skills don't necessarily decay; if they can keep their interests and hopes alive (like Jack Williamson), their experience allows them greater depths to explore.
That certainly is one approach to take. My own is to acknowledge the inner child and try to work with my first fascination with science fiction. I have tried to build on its idea content and narrative drive rather than to discard them.
What you call "the Golden Age tradition" of stringing stories together into novels was not so much a tradition as a consequence of the fact that almost no genre SF novels were published between 1926 and 1946.
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