Literary Birthday – 6 June – Patrick Rothfuss

Happy Birthday, Patrick Rothfuss, born on 6 June 1973.

Patrick Rothfuss Quotes

1. I can probably say, with a fair amount of confidence, that I revise more than anyone else in the genre, if not maybe more than anyone who is published today…I like to show it to thirty or forty people and make changes based on their feedback before I ever show it to the editor. Then, when I get the feedback from the editor, I change those things and show it to another thirty or forty people. (Lightspeed Magazine)
2. I go through, reread it, smooth out rough bits, tweak phrases, pull out things that aren’t pulling their weight — phrases or sentences or paragraphs; I move things around to adjust the pacing. I’ve pulled out whole chapters, inserted chapters; I insert characters, change description. Sometimes I just massage the language so that it’s beautiful; sometimes it gets too beautiful, and that can be distracting, so then I have to tone that down. (Lightspeed Magazine)
3. You need to understand that I am a freak, and words are just the tip of the iceberg. The order of scenes, characterization, tension, and subplot. I obsess about these things. I don’t want them good. I want them perfect. (Blog)
4. I love fantasy; that’s what I read for fun, it’s what I read professionally to keep abreast of what’s in the genre — it’s where my heart is. But that said, that doesn’t mean I can’t be critical of the genre, and the truth is we do things better than any other genre. Some things we excel in. We play the ‘What If?‘ game better than anyone else; we can have fantastical things, we engage the imagination, we force people to speculate and consider impossibilities. And that’s wonderful. (Lightspeed Magazine)
5. Whenever you write a character, you want to make them themselves, you want to make them unique. You don’t want fifty characters in your book and they all pretty much act and think the same except they have different coloured hair. (Lightspeed Magazine)
6. I’m just very careful with my words when I write. Obsessively careful. I’m the sort of person who worries about the difference between ‘slim’ and ‘slender’. (Wikiquote)
7. I’ve heard somebody say that some writers are architects and some are gardeners; I’m absolutely a gardener. I know the characters, I know the world, and then the story moves forward and flowers up. That’s not to say that I don’t have a plan, it’s mostly that I don’t chain myself to my plans and expectations. I like to leave myself open for beautiful accidents, for strange things to happen, and then I want to pursue those. That can be hard if you’ve shackled yourself to an outline. (Lightspeed Magazine)
8. Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. (The Name of the Wind)
9. It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story. (The Name of the Wind)
10. A lot of new writers assume you have to know the where the story is going and that it flows out as molten gold. But really, sometimes you think you are going to one place, but then you decide that is dumb idea. Then you go somewhere else and it is a worse idea. But then you switch again and you might have a beautiful accident. (A-Z)

Patrick Rothfuss is an American epic fantasy author. He is best known for his highly acclaimed series The Kingkiller Chronicle, beginning with Rothfuss’ debut novel, The Name of the Wind. The book won several awards, including a Quill Award (for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror). The sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear topped The New York Times Best Seller list. He has also written two novellas, The Slow Regard of Silent Things and The Narrow Road Between Desires.

Source for photograph: Kyle Cassidy, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Patrick-rothfuss-2014-kyle-cassidy.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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