Carol Berg Quotes

#1. Write. Write. Write. Learn how to revise. No story is perfect straight from the keyboard.

Carol Berg

#2. From the instant of our first meeting I judged him so, though it could be said that I was prejudiced. When one is standing naked on a slave-auction block in a wind cold enough to freeze a demon's backside, one is unlikely to have a fair impression of anyone.

Carol Berg

#3. Some reviewers call my stories dark - and yes, there is violence and angst, and the stakes are high - but I like to think that the endings are satisfying and hopeful.

Carol Berg

#4. For the 'Rai-kirah' books, I began with the image of Aleksander riding the great wastelands, and that quickly morphed into the desert. Because I wanted my slave market cold and miserable, I chose to set the opening scene in the empire's summer capital in the mountains.

Carol Berg

#5. I never believed I could write anything. No way - write a whole story? Figuring out all that plotting and symbolism? How do you foreshadow things?

Carol Berg

#6. I would love to have written Roger Zelazny's first five books of 'Amber.' What a great idea he had about the shadings of reality!

Carol Berg

#7. I like to write stories that read like historical fiction about great, world-changing events through the lens of a flawed protagonist.

Carol Berg

#8. The world goes on, little Seri," he said. "A soldier never dies. His blood makes the grass green for his children.

Carol Berg

#9. Write a million words before thinking about getting published.

Carol Berg

#10. Loyalty never put blood back in a man's veins.

Carol Berg

#11. Writing is communication, and you don't know how you're doing until you put it in front of someone else's eyes. You also learn from critiquing other writers' work.

Carol Berg

#12. Of all the things I had learned in my life, nothing was so simple as fanatics imagined.

Carol Berg

#13. Books don't prattle. Books don't make demands. Yet they give you everything they possess. It's a very satisfying partnership.

Carol Berg

#14. At one of the first science fiction conventions I ever went to, I saw a guy wearing a sandwich board promoting his book. Count me out of that one.

Carol Berg

#15. So what is this feadnach? Is it another curse that makes me beholden to slaves and shrews?'
'No, my lord. It is your heart. Difficult as it may be to comprehend, there is a possibility you may have one.

Carol Berg

#16. Her soul was a fifth season, of richer hue than autumn, bursting with more life than spring, hidden away, ready to transform the world with such glory as it had never seen.

Carol Berg

#17. Read. Read. Read. Read many genres. Read good writing. Read bad writing and figure out the difference. Learn the craft of writing.

Carol Berg

#18. I had really good English teachers in elementary through high school. Not only were we required to read a lot - which is the best training for writing - we were drilled on grammar every day, every night. I hated the drill part, but I don't dangle my participles too often.

Carol Berg

#19. There is one plot point in one of the 'D'Arnath' books that I don't think I handled as well as I could have. Am I going to tell you which one? No way!

Carol Berg

#20. One of the things that put me off writing for a while was that piece of advice everybody gives new writers: 'Write what you know.' Nobody would ever want to read about my boring life! But I do know a lot of things about different societies' cultures and mythologies. The way people were and are.

Carol Berg

#21. Memory has no power but what the soul chooses to make of it.

Carol Berg