You spend so much time wondering who you are, don't you think? You flounder about, searching for your identity, when most of the time it is plain as the nose on your face. You struggle with questions of purpose and need, and forget that the answers are found mostly inside yourselves.

Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way.

Let me tell you something you haven't learned yet, something you learn only by living awhile. As you get older, you find that life begins to wear you down. Doesn't matter who you are or what you do, it happens. Experience, time, events - they all conspire against you to steal away your energy, to erode your confidence, to make you question things you wouldn't have given a second thought to when you were young. It happens gradually, a chipping away that you don't even notice at first, and then one day it's there. You wake up and you just don't have the fire anymore." He smiled.

Evil contained is not evil destroyed.

My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.

You can get away with breaking all of the other rules at least once in a while, but you can't get away with breaking this one. Readers will accept almost anything from you if you don't make them feel they have wasted their time and money. Remember, you can bore readers in a lot of different ways. It doesn't necessarily take a dearth of action; too much action can get you the same result. Everything in writing, like in life, requires balance.

THE NAME OF THE WIND marks the debut of a writer we would all do well to watch. Patrick Rothfuss has real talent, and his tale of Kvothe is deep and intricate and wondrous.