Inspiration From Authors Who Love Myth

Geiger Richárd’s Endrei Zalán - Károly Fekten: The History of the World is in the public domain.

Since I didn’t sleep enough last night and can barely muster the energy for my last hour of writing today, I’m rounding up these inspirational quotes from authors I admire who also happen to love mythology and speculative fiction. While this post gives me an excuse to take some old handbooks from my shelf for a second read, if I’m lucky it will also help you and me both work through the day.

Laugh at Rejection

“. . . be secure in the knowledge that no one will ever loathe your work quite as much as the Game of Thrones fandom loathes the last few episodes of Game of Thrones. And if I’m wrong, and your readers make that title of your new book trend for over 24 hours due to how much they hated it? Congratulations! You have been successful beyond even my wildest predictions, and I am predicting great things for you.”

Kelly Link in her 2019 speech at the One Story Debutante Ball

“When I got the rejection slip. . . I pounded a nail into the wall … wrote “Happy Stamps” on the rejection slip,  and poked it onto the nail. Then I sat on my bed and listened to Fats sing “I’m Ready.” I felt pretty good, actually. When you’re still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.

By the time I was fourteen (and shaving twice a week whether I needed to or not) the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing. By the time I was sixteen I’d begun to get rejection slips with handwritten notes a little more encouraging than the advice to stop using staples and start using paperclips. The first of these hopeful notes was from Algis Budrys, then the editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction, who read a story of mine called “The Night of the Tiger” (the inspiration was, I think, an episode of The Fugitive in which Dr. Richard Kimble worked as an attendant cleaning out cages in a zoo or a circus) and wrote: “This is good. Not for us, but good. You have talent. Submit again.”

Those four brief sentences, scribbled by a fountain pen that left big ragged blotches in its wake, brightened the dismal winter of my sixteenth year. Ten years or so later, after I’d sold a couple of novels, I discovered ‘The Night of the Tiger” in a box of old manuscripts and thought it was still a perfectly respectable tale, albeit one obviously written by a guy who had only begun to learn his chops. I rewrote it and on a whim resubmitted it to F&SF. This time they bought it. One thing I’ve noticed is that when you’ve had a little success, magazines are a lot less apt to use that phrase, “Not for us.”

Stephen King in his book On Writing

John William Waterhouse’s Echo and Narcissus is in the public domain.

“When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thickskinned, to learn that not every project will survive. A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.” 

Neil Gaiman in his keynote address for the May 17, 2012 commencement ceremony at The University of the Arts

Revel in Creativity

“…the history of the world could be seen as an ongoing battle between good and bad imaginations – and the existence we have created on Earth is both sad and uplifting as a result. Your imagination and your stories exist within this wider context, and sometimes you’ll find you need to break free of other people’s imaginations to allow your own uniqueness to shine through.”

Jeff VanderMeer in Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction

“Even in merely reading a fairy tale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence; and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.”

Ursula K. Le Guin in Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Language of the Night

Joseph Fay’s Faust and Mephisto in the Dungeon is in the public domain.

Take Concrete Steps

“It's important for me to touch base with the story every day. Even if I know I don't have time to write, taking ten minutes to think about it, or reread a chapter, helps to keep the fictional dream firmly in my mind. At the same time, I think there's nothing like perspective--taking a break from a particular scene, and coming back to it a week later. I also swear by long walks outside. No matter how stuck I am, I always figure something out from a walk-- something about the motion of my body gets my mind moving as well. And finally, I love to read literary criticism of ancient texts. Hearing scholars argue with each other helps to clarify my own thinking, and spark new ideas.”

Madeline Miller, in this interview published on GoodReads

Keep Your Perspective

“Most people who attempt to write literary novels, let’s face it, do a pretty piss-poor job. As Sturgeon himself put it, in what came to be known in the SF field as Surgeon’s law, when someone once asked him how he could defend science fiction when ninety percent of it was crap: “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” No one uses the myriad failed literary attempts to demean the whole category of literature.

Samuel R. Delany in About Writing

Bernard Picard’s engraving of Ixion is in the public domain.