![]() ![]() Screenwriter Eric Heisserer estimates he received 100 rejections when pitching Arrival to producers. Nor did it help that the story features a female main character, who happens to be an academic, rather than a male action hero. The drama of deciphering alien syntax did not make Arrival particularly easy to adapt. Well, how would we communicate? Well, we'd have to make sure they understood what communication was, what an individual was, that we even perceive time in the same way so that we can communicate about things in the past, present and future." "It's a first contact story so what would happen first?," Hendrix explains. "We really like to get to the dramatic parts of our story, right? So if we're going to write a story about first contact with aliens, we're going to want to skip to the exciting parts."īut not Chiang - he's more interested in beautiful explanations. " observes Grady Hendrix, himself an author of speculative fiction. "Ted does something that not a lot of other writers do. And I tend to think of my stories in terms of sentences." "Never," he replies, politely suppressing a snort. Given Chiang's tendency toward exactitude and intellectual rigor, I wondered whether his imagination led him to see stories like movies in his head as he wrote. ![]() Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Stories of Your Life and Others Author Ted Chiang ![]()
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