Patrick Nielsen Hayden Quotes

A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.

In general, when I'm writing, I concentrate on the story itself, and I leave it to other people, such as agents and publishers, to work out who it's for.

I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.

For every issue, I send four pages of finished marginals and they select the ones they need.

Headline writing is tough because often times you are given a predetermined number of spaces and words depending on the layout and the type of the story.

Read good books. Read bad books - and figure out why you don't like them. Then don't do it when you write. If you are a science fiction or fantasy writer, going to conventions and attending panels is very useful.

I bristle at the implication that only with the help of a Big Six editor does a novel lose its self-indulgent aspects. Before the advent of self-publishing, there were plenty of self-indulgent novels on the shelves.

Another time factor is output: proofing and printing. That is, getting your work out of the computer and onto paper and having it satisfy you. It can be time consuming and expensive.

I have a problem with blogs - all the best writers benefit from edits.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

I have heard Science Fiction and Fantasy referred to as the fiction of ideas, and I like that definition, but it's the mainstream public that chooses my books for the most part.

But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.

The way British publishing works is that you go from not being published no matter how good you are, to being published no matter how bad you are.

Don't let anyone discourage you from writing. If you become a professional writer, there are plenty of editors, reviewers, critics, and book buyers to do that.

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it.

I've really loved steampunk for a long time, ever since 'Wild Wild West,' and it's always been a genre and an era that's fascinated me. But so often it's set in England, and that doesn't really resonate with me, or maybe it just seems a little overdone.

It was not until I began to write a book called 'Light Years' that an editor really stepped in. The editor was Joe Fox at Random House, and he wound up editing a subsequent book.

I wanted to be a literary writer, so I wrote story after story and sent them to 'The New Yorker.'

As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.

There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.

I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories.

I resisted children's writing for a long time. I saw myself as a writer of literary fiction. But I had so much more fun writing kids' books.

We served on the editorial board of a literary monthly called Face in 1968 and 1969. He was a young writer, and I was also interested in broad cultural issues. We agreed on all major issues and became friends.

I'm really happy to have the chance to talk about the editing process. It's something that I think doesn't get the weight it deserves, especially with the rise of self-publishing.

I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published.