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Writing a good query letter has very little to do with writing a good novel. But if you can't write the one, it makes it really hard to get the other published.

Patrick Rothfuss

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Patrick Rothfuss
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: June 6
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Madison
Wisconsin
Patrick James Rothfuss
Good
Novel
Write
Makes
Littles
Query
Little
Queries
Hard
Published
Writing
Letter
Really
Letters

More quotes by Patrick Rothfuss

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Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.
Patrick Rothfuss
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That is like throwing two virgins into a bed. Enthusiasm, passion, and ignorance are not a good combination. Someone is likely to get hurt.
Patrick Rothfuss
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Nobody cooks using just one ingredient. Why would you write using just one flavor of story?
Patrick Rothfuss
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My bad luck got tangled up with my bad decisions, and I'm paying for it.
Patrick Rothfuss
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Humor is important. If you're going to tell any sort of realistic story, you're going to have to have humor in it, because people are funny. Clever people especially.
Patrick Rothfuss
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But how awful would that be? How terrible to live surrounded by the stark, sharp, hollowness of things that simply were enough?
Patrick Rothfuss
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I’d heard you were dead.” I heard you wear a red lace corset,” I said matter-of-factly. “But I don’t believe every bit of nonsense that gets rumored about.
Patrick Rothfuss
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Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.
Patrick Rothfuss
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You never do things the easy way, do you? she said. There's an easy way? I asked.
Patrick Rothfuss
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When someone writes something dazzlingly brilliant, people want to imitate it. The result is a lot of less-than-brilliant knock-offs. Elves, Dwarves, Goblin army, cursed ring, evil sorcerer. Tolkien did it. It rocked. Let's move on. Let's do something new.
Patrick Rothfuss
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All explicit knowledge is translated knowledge, and all translation is imperfect.
Patrick Rothfuss
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If you open the door and realize things like the fact that Batman is occupying the same narrative space that Robin Hood used to fill 400 years ago, then you have the freedom to ignore the pointless what is literature discussion and just talk about stories.
Patrick Rothfuss
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Music sounds different to the one who plays it. It is the musician's curse.
Patrick Rothfuss
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If you're going to have a book full of clever people and nobody ever jokes, it's just not going to ring true to the reader. That said, humor writing is the hardest kind of writing there is.
Patrick Rothfuss
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I have a blog where I keep in touch with my fans. I write about things that are important to me. Sometimes on there I'll just tell a little story about the things that happen in my everyday life. People seem to enjoy them well enough.
Patrick Rothfuss
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But sometimes the best help a person can find is helping someone else.
Patrick Rothfuss
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That's all that really matters in the end. Stories.
Patrick Rothfuss
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There is a sort of camaraderie that rarely exists except between men who have fought the same enemies and know the same women.
Patrick Rothfuss
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Language is inexorably tied to power and understanding. And power and understanding are the roots of magic. Just the act of writing something down is a magical act.
Patrick Rothfuss
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She taught me I should never do anything in private I did not want talked about in public, and cautioned me not to talk in my sleep.
Patrick Rothfuss