One of the things I love, and I'm a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.
George R. R. MartinItโs being ready to accept rejection. You can work on a book for two years and get it published, and itโs like you may as well have thrown it down a well. Itโs not all champagne and doing interviews with The New York Times.
George R. R. MartinI've always taken that as my guiding principle and the rest is just set dressing. You can have dragons in it, or aliens and starships, or a western about a gunslinger, or even literary fiction, and ultimately you're still writing about the human heart in conflict with itself.
George R. R. Martin