Carol Berg Quotes & Sayings

Memory has no power but what the soul chooses to make of it. — Carol Berg

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

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

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

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

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

I'm a fairly ordinary person - a lifelong reader, a former software engineer, and former math teacher. I come from a wonderful family of teachers, musicians, librarians, and engineers. I think I surprised them as well as my friends and coworkers when I took up writing as a hobby and let it take over my life! — Carol Berg

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

My college roommate gave me her copy of 'Lord of the Rings,' and I read that probably five or six times - not because I think it's the greatest thing ever written, though some people certainly think it is - but the world he creates is so vivid. So real that he designed its own languages, history and mythology. — Carol Berg

I enjoy worldbuilding very much. I generally start with an approximation. With 'Flesh and Spirit' and 'Breath and Bone,' because I was thinking of a world on the brink of a dark age, I began with the sense of Roman Britain. But I purposely set the geography to match something other than Britain - which has been overdone. — Carol Berg

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

Loyalty never put blood back in a man's veins. — Carol Berg

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

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

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

Read. Read. Read. Read many genres. Read good writing. Read bad writing and figure out the difference. Learn the craft of writing. — Carol Berg

Write. Write. Write. Learn how to revise. No story is perfect straight from the keyboard. — Carol Berg

Write a million words before thinking about getting published. — Carol Berg

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

Of all the things I had learned in my life, nothing was so simple as fanatics imagined. — Carol Berg

On my seventh birthday, my father swore, for the first of many times, that I would die facedown in a cesspool. On that same occasion, my mother, with all the accompanying mystery and elevated language appropriate for a prominent diviner, turned her cards, screamed delicately, and proclaimed that my doom was written in water and blood and ice. As for me, from about that time and for twenty years since, I had spat on my middle finger and slapped the rump of every aingerou I noticed, murmuring the sincerest, devoutest prayer that I might prove my parents' predictions wrong. Not so much that I feared the doom itself - doom is just the hind end of living, after all - but to see the two who birthed me confounded. — Carol Berg

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

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

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

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