George R. R. Martin Quotes

In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.

My advice to aspiring writers of fantasy trilogies or series is that each book needs two main plots. There's the 'big story', the over-arching grand plot of the entire series, and there is the complete-in-itself, one-book plot.

Tolkien is considered the grandfather of fantasy and, for me, I consider myself the grandson, with Terry Brooks as the kind of crazy uncle of fantasy, being the one who brought me into it.

I actually think that short stories transfer to film much better than novels do.

In a weird way, I think I'm much better at oneshots than longform. So I try to focus on five or six-issue arcs. I have a real fondness for the one-shots because that's where I do my best storytelling.

'The Blade Itself' was my first book. Probably I should've tried a few short stories first, but for some reason I decided to begin with Everest.

I've been writing fiction since I was a kid. From the age of 15 to 25, I probably wrote more than 50 short stories, one of which was published in 'The Paris Review' in 1989.

You always want to run before you can walk.

I think the tendency to over-explain and over describe is one of the most common failings in fantasy. It's an unfortunate piece of Tolkien's legacy. Don't get me wrong, Tolkien was a great worldbuilder, but he got a little caught up describing his world at times, at the expense of the overall story.

Some tropes are universal. Boy meets girl. Betrayal and revenge. The search to discover a hidden truth.... A mother's love isn't cliché, it's universal. These things are archetypes. They're the building blocks of myth and legend. They are a big part about what it means to be human.

Some writing courses will advise you to write what you know. I've always thought this is very odd advice ... because it means, for example, that I should not be writing about Nicholas Flamel, because I didn't live in France in the 15th Century, I was not an alchemyst, am not immortal (despite the rumours) and do not know magic.

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.

writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!

Chekhov will seek out the key situation in the life of a cabman or a charwoman, and make them glow for a brief moment in the tender light of his sympathy.

I love magic and playing with magic systems. But to me, good fantasy like all fiction comes down to good character and plotting.

When you write a novel you have to live with the characters for a long time. So I prefer short stories. I never wrote anything more than 250 pages.

When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.

There are characters in some short stories who exist as people, and there are other characters in different short stories who exist as purely literary constructs. You know, the young man in "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire" - I probably got that right - is a literary construct, and enjoys being a literary construct. He has no life off stage, whereas the young men in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" were as near to being real human beings as I could possibly get them.

When people ask, "Is there any advice you'd give a young writer?," I say write short stories. They afford lots of failure. Pastiche is a great way to start.

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

A dream inspiring a story is different than placing a description of a dream in a story. When you describe a character's dream, it has to be sharper than reality in some way, and more meaningful. It has to somehow speak to plot, character, and all the rest. If you're writing something fantastical, it can be a really deadly choice because your story already has elements that can seem dreamlike.

There is much to admire in Peter Brett's writing, and his concept is brilliant. There's action and suspense all the way.

I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.

What writers of fantasy, science fiction, and much historical fiction do for a living is different from what writers of so-called literary or other kinds of fiction do. The name of the game in F/SF/HF is creating fictional worlds and then telling particular stories set in those worlds. If you're doing it right, then the reader, coming to the end of the story, will say, "Hey, wait a minute, there are so many other stories that could be told in this universe!" And that's how we get the sprawling, coherent fictional universes that fandom is all about.