Quotes by Eric Brown

But all my other novels - before Freya - I wrote at a rate of five thousand words every day for around twenty days, at the end of which I'd have a 100k manuscript - and feel wrecked. Then I leave it fore a while and come back a month or so later and edit, cut, rewrite.

I don't write hard SF - that is, technology-driven science fiction. I don't read this stuff, either. I like to read, and to write, SF about people, the consequences of technological and social change on individuals or groups of individuals. Fantasy and hard SF aren't about these things.

I find it hard to take straight fantasy, as I don't believe in magic or the occult, and hard SF leaves me cold because I don't like reading pages and pages of science or scientific extrapolation at the expense of characters and emotion.

I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.

I think my fascination is less with genre figures than with writers in general.

I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.

I write at home, from around 9.30 to midday, when I stop for lunch, then begin again at one, until roughly 3.30. Then I start again around seven and do a couple of hours. My writing environment is a quiet, book-filled study. Or, rather, it has been for the last twenty years.

In '82 I'd sold a short SF play for children to Holt, Rheinhart and Winston, but I didn't consider this as a 'start' or a breakthrough in any way.

It does appear that I've been doing nothing but scribbling, but some of the books were written a while back, and have only just gone into print.

It was nice to see that there was every type of story represented, not just middle-of-the-road Vernian adventures. We had satire, social comment, comedy, as well as adventure, exploration and entertainments. What I didn't like was rejecting stories - being on the other side of this, I know what it feels like.

'Made it as a writer'? I'm still wondering if I've made it as a writer. I've made it as a published writer of the type of SF that I want to write and read, but I'm still waiting for that big breakthrough.

The inspiration to write? Perhaps it's not so much inspiration, as a NEED to write. I get itchy and guilty and dissatisfied when I haven't written for a while. Ideas come to me and need to be written down.

The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn't always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine - they're more willing to try stories by newcomers, if those tales are good.

Verne is very dated now, and to be frank he wasn't that great a writer. His characterisation is weak, his plotting pretty basic, and his style leaves a lot to be desired... having said all that, this criticism is to take him out of context: you really need to look at his achievements in light of when he was writing, and what was being written at the time, and then you come to appreciate what a phenomenon Verne was.

Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.

Which, of course, isn't the point of writing - but it would be nice if, along with the creative satisfaction of writing and seeing my work in print, I could do more than merely scrape a living. Okay, moaning over.

Why my interest in writers? Well, I'm one, and many of my friends are writers. I know what it's like to write. I'm interested in the creative process. I'm fascinated by the disparity between who we are on the outside, and what we have bubbling away inside us.