All Our Wrong Todays author Elan Mastai

The play was written by a family friend, Dennis Foon. He went on to write several novels, including the Longlight Legacy trilogy, which is wonderful and well-worth reading. That play was the first time I understood that the works of art and entertainment I enjoyed were written by actual people. And in this case someone I knew through my parents. It was a job you could do. And so, from that moment, I wanted to do it too.

Where do you live now?

Toronto, Ontario, Canada. A culturally diverse, quickly growing city with terrific art and great restaurants. But not quite as scenic as my hometown of Vancouver, sadly.

What did you do before you were a writer?

I got hired to write my first movie when I was still a university student and have been writing professionally ever since. So, I didn’t do much before I was a writer, although I was specifically a screenwriter rather than a novelist. My most recent movie was called What If and starred Daniel Radcliffe, Zoe Kazan, Adam Driver, and Mackenzie Davis. I did work at both the Toronto International Film Festival and the Vancouver International Film Festival, which gave me an eye-opening crash course in how movies are bought and sold and introduced to the world in a frenzy of hype and hope. Not unlike novels, really. Less popcorn.

What are you reading at the moment?

I recently finished Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli, which was terrific. I’m currently reading The Big Picture by Sean Carroll, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. A lot of nonfiction, apparently. I typically read mostly fiction, but I’m doing research for a new book.

Which fictional character would you like to go out drinking with and why?

Kilgore Trout. He tells great stories.

What would be your desert island…

Song: Where Is My Mind? by The Pixies. Sorry, just confirming, but does this desert island have electricity? Would I need the song on vinyl or is a digital file okay?

Book: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Because I’ve been meaning to read it for, like, decades, so maybe if I was trapped on a desert island I’d finally do it. But to be honest my ideal book would be a massive blank journal that I can write in. So I’d read The Brothers Karamazov and then bleach the pages with sea water and sunshine to write my own book on its pages. Sorry, Dostoyevsky.

Film: The Apartment, directed by Billy Wilder, written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. Wait, this desert island has a TV but it only shows one movie? Is this actually some sort of experimental laboratory or shadowy government prison? These questions are provoking a lot of other questions…

Not many people know this, but I’m very good at…

Housepainting. I spent a summer during university painting houses. My line work is very clean. I don’t have to lay down tape to protect the edges. I’m smooth with a roller. When I spackle over a chip in the drywall, you would seriously never know it was ever damaged.

What is your guilty pleasure?

Dumb, glossy action movies, probably. I find it comforting how convinced they are that any problem can be solved by two people punching each other while the camera whizzes around them. In my actual life experience, no problem has ever been solved by people punching each other. Also, unnecessarily expensive chocolate. I can barely tell the difference between a delicately packaged wedge of artisanal single variety chocolate and a cheap corner store candy bar, but that’s why the pleasure is guilty.

What moment in history would you have wanted to be present at and why?

The original premiere of Macbeth in 1606. I’d really like to know if Hecate was part of the original Shakespearean text or inserted at a later date as some scholars have suggested. Ugh, sorry, such a nerdy answer. Okay, also, my parents met by happenstance at a café in Jerusalem. Thirty seconds earlier or thirty seconds later, they wouldn’t have run into each other and I wouldn’t be here (and you’d be reading a Q&A with someone else). If I could be assured that my presence wouldn’t meddle with the space-time continuum, I’d like to witness that moment.

What’s the most useful piece of advice about writing you’ve been given?

Finish things. Rewriting an existing piece of material, even if it’s lousy, is so much easier than starting from scratch with a blank page. You’re going to end up rewriting everything so many times anyway, so just finish it no matter what and fix it after.

And finally, what’s the question (and answer to the question) no one has ever asked you but you wish they would?

What is time? I have two answers. First, time is entropy. Our experience of duration is based on the changing state of the matter around us and of which we are composed. Second, time is gravity. As we know, time is inseparable from space, what we call the four dimensions of space-time. Gravity isn’t just a force that exerts itself on mass. It’s the field that defines space and time. Okay, so, if time is change as defined by gravity, we now have a framework to conceive how a vehicle might escape the gravity of time the way a spacecraft escapes the gravity of space. As we know from rocket science, escaping gravity typically requires 90% of a vehicle’s mass to be fuel. If you want to build a time machine, an interesting question is — what exactly is that fuel?

As you can see, there’s a very good reason nobody asks me this question.