It’s being ready to accept rejection. You can work on a book for two years and get it published, and it’s like you may as well have thrown it down a well. It’s not all champagne and doing interviews with The New York Times.
Names are hard. I have a library of What to Name Your Baby books, and I’m always picking up new books, and books of baby names from other countries. I like cool-sounding names.
I work for two years on a book and it comes out and two days later I’ve got my first e-mail: When is the next one coming out?
One of the things I love, and I’m a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.
I’ve written some standalone novels, but a book series allows fans in. There’s much more intense involvement.
I knew that, when writing a book, you’re not constrained by a budget. You’re not constrained by what you can do, in terms of the special effects technology. You’re not limited to any particular running time.
I had this desire to see the world. I couldn’t see any of it, but I saw it in my imagination, and that’s why I always read books, and I could go to Mars or Middle Earth or the Hyborian age.
I had a couple of friends, but I was mostly the kid with his nose in a book.
I have idea files of books that I want to write one of these days, stories I want to write one of these days, but I’ll probably never get to them.
I’m a huge fan of Tolkien. I read those books when I was in junior high school and high school, and they had a profound effect on me. I’d read other fantasy before, but none of them that I loved like Tolkien.
The vast majority of writers out there, they finish their books, and no one cares whether their book is late or ever comes out at all. And then it comes out, and two reviews are published, and it sells 12 copies.
Start with short stories. After all, if you were taking up rock climbing, you wouldn’t start with Mount Everest. So if you’re starting fantasy, don’t start with a nine-book series.
With a book I am the writer and I am also the director and I’m all of the actors and I’m the special effects guy and the lighting technician: I’m all of that. So if it’s good or bad, it’s all up to me.
You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.
It’s really irritating when you open a book, and 10 pages into it you know that the hero you met on page one or two is gonna come through unscathed, because he’s the hero. This is completely unreal, and I don’t like it.
The most important thing for any aspiring writer, is to read! And not just the sort of thing you’re trying to write, be that fantasy, SF, comic books, whatever. You need to read everything.
Books are dead men talking.
My mistake was in ever opening the books.
Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.
A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.