Words matter. These are the best Fred Saberhagen Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The Swords were still interesting but by then a cast of characters had started to appear and go on from book to book, and other things about the world began to feel constricting. And there were other things I wanted to do, so I closed the series up and stopped it.
Actually ideas are everywhere. It’s the paperwork, that is, sitting down and thinking them into a coherent story, trying to find just the right words, that can and usually does get to be labor.
If people ask me for the ingredients of success, I say one is talent, two is stubbornness or determination, and third is sheer luck. You have to have two out of the three. Any two will probably do.
I have some good stories yet to tell.
I wouldn’t like to just do one story or one type of stories all the time.
The comments I most appreciate come from ordinary readers who’ve happened on one of my books at some time of stress in their lives, and who actually credit the book with helping them through a bad time. It’s happened a few times in forty years.
Research is of considerable importance in certain fields, such as science and history.
I finally decided one day, reading science fiction magazines of the time, I could do at least as well as some of these people are doing. So I finally made a serious effort.
I started writing seriously about 1960, at the fairly advanced age of 30.
More immediately, I’m currently working on another Dracula in which there will be connections with ancient Egypt. That’s about as far as I want to go in commenting on current work.
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.
Probably all the books I’ve ever written have been efforts to define the boundaries of humanity.
My gut feeling is that paper and ink are going to be with us for a long time yet, and in substantial quantities, though certainly books are now going to be available in other forms.
The advice would be the same for any kind of fiction. Keep writing, and keep sending things out, not to friends and relatives, but to people who have the power to buy. A lot of additional, useful tips could be added, but this is fundamental.
There’s a big overlap with the people you meet at the fantasy and science fiction cons.
I had immediate success in the sense that I sold something right off the bat. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake and it really wasn’t. I have drawers full of – or I did have – drawers full of rejection slips.
Mysteries I read for fun, so I will probably never write one, for fear of spoiling the fun.
