Terry Brooks
Terry Brooks
Terence Dean "Terry" Brooksis an American writer of fantasy fiction. He writes mainly epic fantasy, and has also written two movie novelizations. He has written 23 New York Times bestsellers during his writing career, and has over 21 million copies of his books in print. He is one of the biggest-selling living fantasy writers...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth8 January 1944
CitySterling, IL
CountryUnited States of America
Lester del Rey told me repeatedly that the first and most important part of writing fiction is just to think about the story. Don't write anything down. Don't try to pull anything together right away. Just dream for a while and see what happens. There isn't any timetable involved, no measuring stick for how long it ought to take. For each book, it is different. But that period of thinking, of reflection, is crucial to how successful your story will turn out to be.
If anything in your life is more important than writing - anything at all - you should walk away now while you still can. Forewarned is forearmed. For those who cannot or will not walk away, you need only to remember this. Writing is life. Breathe deeply of it.
You can either give in to what youre feeling, just say ‘okay, enough is enough’ and be done with it, or you can fight it.
We should not be less than what we are.
Friendship doesn't have anything to do with shoring up weakness. It has to do with respect and consideration for those you care about. It has to do with wanting to give something back to those you admire.
If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.
After all, you put a lot into creating a universe and everything that goes with it, and it seems a shame to use it only once.
If you are ever completely satisfied with something you have written, you are setting your sights too low. But if you can't let go of your material even after you have done the best that you can with it, you are setting your sights too high.
Fiction writing is a twenty-four-hou r-a-day occupation. You never leave your work behind. It is always with you, and to some extent, you are always thinking about it. You don't take your work home; your work never leaves home. It lives inside you. It resides and grows and comes alive in your mind.
Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own.
Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.
The reader wants to see something happen between pages one and four hundred, and nothing happens if the characters don't change.
If you do not love what you do, if you are not appropriately grateful for the chance to create something magical each time you sit down at the computer or with a pencil and paper in hand, somewhere along the way your writing will betray you.
My interests are different now than they were thirty years ago.