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#WritersCoffeeClub Oct 4: What's a sure sign an author is a master of their craft?
Whenever you read a new book/story by this author, it still manages to surprise you.
(Consider Terry Pratchett as an example. He managed to write 40-something Discworld books without becoming repetitive or formulaic. It's easy to write a series that follows a set template: it's much harder to avoid pandering to the reader's preconceptions.)
@cstross I think the other thing is that every Pratchett book is unmistakeably him as well, even when he's surprising you with new ideas and hugely different concepts.
@cstross Terry used his world to write stories in, rather than writing directly about the world (I'd argue except TCOM/TLF where's he's working out the space in his head, but doing it on the page). The world happens around the story, which comes first. And as the later books start to become more elbow-y, he has more stories and more elbows he wants to get on the page, the world needs to grow with him, helping to avoid some pitfalls.
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