There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.
There is much to admire in Peter Brett’s writing, and his concept is brilliant. There’s action and suspense all the way.
I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.
Well, I think that as a country, we’ve drifted away from appreciating the importance of imagination.
I think I make better use of language and imagery than when I started out.
I might add that you change as a person as you grow older, so you change as a writer, too.
If anything in your life is more important than writing – anything at all – you should walk away now while you still can. Forewarned is forearmed. For those who cannot or will not walk away, you need only to remember this. Writing is life. Breathe deeply of it.
I have learned to do more with less, so you don’t see the big books anymore.
I remember one winter, when I was about five or six, I spent three days with another boy, tracking a bobcat that had been sighted in another county fifty miles away, but which I was sure had come into our neighborhood.
The more complex and overwhelming the threat to a protagonist, the better the opportunity for the author to create a compelling conflict and a dramatic resolution.
If you do not love what you do, if you are not appropriately grateful for the chance to create something magical each time you sit down at the computer or with a pencil and paper in hand, somewhere along the way your writing will betray you.
I want to kick-start your imagination and let you discover the places it can take you.
Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way.
The reader wants to see something happen between pages one and four hundred, and nothing happens if the characters don’t change.
After all, you put a lot into creating a universe and everything that goes with it, and it seems a shame to use it only once.
It’s better to die in pursuit of your dreams than to live a life without hope.
The future is an ever-shifting maze of possibilities until it becomes the present. The future I have shown you tonight is not yet fixed. But it is more likely to become so with the passing of every day because nothing is being done to turn it aside. If you would change it, do as I have told you.
If I have the means, I have the responsibility to employ them.
You spend so much time wondering who you are, don’t you think? You flounder about, searching for your identity, when most of the time it is plain as the nose on your face. You struggle with questions of purpose and need, and forget that the answers are found mostly inside yourselves.
Cats can do whatever they want, whenever they want, without regard to what anyone says or does. Rather like Princesses.