Zelazny on Writing

"I had gathered together all of my rejected stores ... to see whether I could determine what I was doing wrong. One thing struck me about all of them: I was overexploiting. I was describing settings, events and character motivations in too much detail. I decided, in viewing these stories now that they had grown cold, that would find it insulting to have anyone explain anything to me at that length. I resolved thereafter to treat the reader as I would be treated myself, to avoid the unnecessarily explicit, to use more indirection with respect to character and motivation, to draw myself up short whenever I felt the tendency to go on talking once a thing had been shown."

"I am interested in characters in a state of transformation. I feel it would be wrong to write a book where the character proceeds through all of the action and winds up pretty much the same at the end as he was in the beginning, just having an adventure. He has to be changed by the things that take place."

"I decided to try a formula that Max Brand claimed he used. Since he had written about three hundred books, I thought it must have worked for him. He said that he always started with a good guy who went bad, and a bad guy who went good, and had them cross over on their way to down-and-out. So that the story had something for everybody."

"If I were in the process of counseling a would-be science fiction writer, I would say to him: You need a sense of humor and a sense of place. You need a sense of history and a sense of time. You need a sense of science and a sense of the human condition. You need a sense of the fear, shame, and mocking laughter which, for want of a better word, I'll call the guilt that is involved in being a man. But most of all, you need a sense of humor."