Writing Advice from Fantasy Authors

I searched the interviews of twelve successful fantasy authors to find their advice for aspiring authors, which I’ve compiled in this entry. Click on a name to jump to it, or scroll down to read through the full article.

George R. R. Martin | Susanna Clarke | Patrick Rothfuss
Philip Pullman | Neil Gaiman | Ursula K. Le Guin
Peter S. Beagle | Tad Williams | Charles de Lint
Robin Hobb | Steven Erikson | Robert Jordan

George R. R. Martin

Widely considered one of the top authors of fantasy writing today, he is best known for his epic series, A Song of Ice and Fire, which draws inspiration from medieval history - i.e. the Wars of the Roses. The world, though fictional, lacks the spellbooks and magic typically found in fantasy.

The most important thing for any aspiring writer, I think, 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. Read fiction, non-fiction, magazines, newspapers. Read history, historical fiction, biography. Read mystery novels, fantasy, SF, horror, mainstream, literary classics, erotica, adventure, satire. Every writer has something to teach you, for good or ill. (And yes, you can learn from bad books as well as good ones — what not to do)

Source: FAQ page on the author’s official site.

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Susanna Clarke

Author of the 2004 historical fantasy Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and the short story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu, Clarke combines a style similar to that of nineteenth century novelists like Jane Austen or Charles Dickens with decidedly English magic and some less-than-amiable fairies.

I think some of the most sensible advice I can offer is to read a book called Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. It’s not about plot construction or getting published or any of the stuff they put in other books on creative writing (though that stuff can be useful too). Nor is it mystical or spiritual. It’s common-sense advice about writing every day so you build up creative muscles. She was a great believer that anyone, or almost anyone, can learn to write. She wrote her book in the 1930s, but what she says is still as relevant today as it was then.

Source: B&N Interview, Summer 2004.

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Patrick Rothfuss

Author of The Name of the Wind (a fantasy debut of 2007 that drew considerable attention and won the SF/F/H quill award), the forthcoming sequel (which is due next year), and an often-hilarious personal blog.

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.

Source: Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist interview, March 2007.

It’s my belief that you should never show your work to anyone in the publishing world until it shines like a diamond. Rough drafts don’t shine, as a rule. Mine certainly didn’t. That’s why I was rejected for years and years.

Source: Patrick Rothfuss’s blog, March 2007.

• For Patrick Rothfuss’s thoughts on writing action scenes, check out this topic on the Dragonmount forums.
• Pat talks about what needs to be included vs. what ought to be left out in the July 2007 Em Sky interview.

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Philip Pullman

Partial bibliography: Northern Lights (The Golden Compass in the US), The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass, Lyra’s Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, the to-be-published Book of Dust, The Ruby in the Smoke and sequels, The Tin Princess, and The Scarecrow and His Servant.

Don’t listen to any advice, that’s what I’d say. Write only what you want to write. Please yourself. YOU are the genius, they’re not. Especially don’t listen to people (such as publishers) who think that you need to write what readers say they want. Readers don’t always know what they want. I don’t know what I want to read until I go into a bookshop and look around at the books other people have written, and the books I enjoy reading most are books I would never in a million years have thought of myself. So the only thing you need to do is forget about pleasing other people, and aim to please yourself alone.

Source: The “About the Writing” page on Philip Pullman’s official site.

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Neil Gaiman

Books authored include Stardust (recently made into a movie), American Gods (winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel), Coraline, Neverwhere, The Graveyard Book, and several story collections. His blog is here.

Well, I used to have lots of pieces of advice for writers, and these days, I’ve whittled them down to two pieces of advice. Which are, (1) if you’re going to be a writer, you have to write. (2) You have to finish things. Beyond that, I suspect all is detail, but I would add to that, that having written it and finished it, you should send it off to somewhere that might publish it, and not get discouraged if it comes back.

Source: CNN interview, July 2001.

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Ursula K. Le Guin

Author of too many books (and in too many genres) to list here, but she’s most best known - at least in the fantasy community - for A Wizard of Earthsea and its sequels.

To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don’t realize that. And you can’t write unless you read.

Source: Writing World interview, 2000.

• Ursula Le Guin has a section on her website for writing advice.
• She wrote a book about writing, Steering the Craft, in 1998.

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Peter S. Beagle

Author of The Last Unicorn, which is Patrick Rothfuss’s favorite book - and which, according to Wikipedia, “routinely polls as one of the top ten fantasy novels of all time.”

Writing has nothing to do with publishing.  Nothing. People get totally confused about that.  You write because you have to - you write because you can’t not write.  The rest is show-business. I can’t state that too strongly.  Just write - worry about the rest of it later, if you worry at all.  What matters is what happens to you while you’re writing the story, the poem, the play.  The rest is show-business.

Source: Scifi.com interview, November 1996 (archive.org).

There’s a phrase, “sitzfleisch”, which means just plain sitting on your ass and getting it done.  Just showing up for work.  My uncle Raphael was a painter, and he used to say, “If the muse is late for work, start without her”.  You have to be there.  You have to be there, and do it, and grind it out, even when it is grinding and you know you’re probably going to rewrite all this tomorrow.

Source: an older Google cache of http://west-of-the-moon.net/peterbeagleinterview.htm. The original appears to have been taken offline, the Google cache is gone now, and archive.org has no entry for it - so you’ll have to take my word on this one. I did manage to screenshot it, but I can’t seem to find where I put it at present.

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Tad Williams

Author of the complted Memory, Sorrow and Thorn (fantasy) and Otherland (sci-fi) series, and he’s currently writing the third volume in the Shadowmarch trilogy (also fantasy).

Read a lot of other kinds of books. Make fantasy a small part of what you read. Learn a lot about the world and finish things, even if it is just a short story. Finish it before you start something else, finish it before you start rewriting it. That’s really important. It’s to find out if you’re going to be a writer or not, because that’s one of the most important lessons. Most, maybe 90% of people, will start writing and never finish what they started. If you want to be a writer that’s the hardest and most important lesson: Finish it. Then go back to fix it.

Source: De Nieuwsbron interview, 2006.

Photo: Ejdzej

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Charles de Lint

I’m running out of interesting ways of describing authors, but Charles de Lint’s a fairly popular author of urban fantasy stories and novels. Um, yeah. Random works include Moonheart, The Onion Girl, Moonlight and Vines and Widdershins.

Write from the heart, what has meaning to you personally; have the patience and discipline to sit down and do it every day whether you’re feeling inspired or not; never be afraid to take chances, in fact, make sure you take chances. As soon as you become complacent, you become boring.  [...]  Read as much as possible, not simply in the genre, or what you think you’re interested in, but other things as well.

Source: The Rose & Thorn interview, date unknown.

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Robin Hobb

A character-driven writer of epic fantasy who commonly uses the first-person perspective. She wrote the Farseer trilogy (Assassin’s Apprentice, etc), The Tawny Man trilogy, and the Soldier Son trilogy.

I meet far too many people who are going to be writers ’someday.’ When they are out of high school, when they’ve finished college, after the wedding, when the kids are older, after I retire. [...] You will never have any more free time than you do right now. So, whether you are 12 or 70, you should sit down today and start being a writer if that is what you want to do.

Source: FAQ on RobinHobb.com.

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Steven Erikson

Steven Erikson is a Canadian writer and the author of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which has a “dark, gritty atmosphere” (his words) and leans toward a style of shorter sentences.

[T]wo basic rules — finish what you start and write all the time, preferably daily.

Source: Wavnutz chat transcript, October 2004.

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Robert Jordan

…is well-known enough that writing an introduction seems pointless. (Hint: The Wheel of Time.)

My advice to aspiring writers is: (1) Write, send what you’ve written to publisher, then immediately begin writing something else. And (2) Read. Read as much good stuff as you can find time for, and try to learn from it. Also (3) Write what you like to read. If you don’t like reading it, you won’t be able to write it very well.

Source: Wotmania interview, April 2004.

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Photo: Jeanne Collins, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

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And that’s it for my fantasy-author writing advice compilation. For now, anyway. I may try to do something similar for other genres at some point. (Mystery, perhaps? Romance? Literary fiction? So little time.)

But I’m sure I missed many excellent writers (and interviews) while writing this post; if you know of any, please do leave me a comment - I’ll start a list of reader-suggested additions at the end of the post.