Elan Mastai: 'I wrote about my mother’s death, but I used time machines to do it'

Already a screenwriter, the author of All Our Wrong Todays explains his delight in avoiding Hollywood’s filters and using the special effects that only work in books

When Elan Mastai was 26, his mother died. “I think about where I am right now in my life, and it’s hard to imagine it the way it is had my mother not died,” says the Canadian screenwriter, now 43. “I started writing because of that. I started going from wanting to be a writer to actually writing. The last gift my mother gave me was the awareness that I don’t have unlimited time. When you’re young, it’s very easy to be your own worst enemy. It’s very easy to create a lot of obstacles that keep you from going after the things you want to do. It’s very easy to convince yourself that if you don’t try you won’t fail. Losing my mom changed that for me.”

Over the next decade, Mastai built a successful Hollywood career, with writing credits including Alone in the Dark, The Samaritan (released as Fury in the UK) and the Daniel Radcliffe-Zoe Kazan romcom What If. But in 2013, when he started thinking about a story where a man strands himself in an alternate reality, Mastai realised that it wouldn’t be a screenplay, but a novel – a revelation he describes as “a little bit intimidating”.

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via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2oC1X6p