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6.
AOTW: Other than a limitless imagination, what one quality should a fantasy writer possess?
Robin Hobb: A sense of fair play. Magic cannot fix it all. There have to be consequences for everything, and balance. Don't make the peasant boy become the finest swordsman in the city after three days of practice. Don't tell me the rules of your magic, and then break them all in the last three pages of the book to make everything come out all right. And please don't tell me that the happy ending is that everything returns to exactly as it was at the beginning of the book, and no one is changed or hurt by the experience. Play fair with the reader.
Martha Wells: I think it's an ability to do research for whatever world you are trying to build and an awareness that the way people live, their level of technology, affects the way they think. Growing up in the United States, I think we often have the idea that the Constitution and the scientific method are as essential as gravity, but they aren't things that are shared by people who live in medieval societies. I think a fantasy author needs an ability to stand outside his or herself and to imagine how people from other time periods and cultures would think and react to their environment.
Lois McMaster Bujold: Self-discipline. Writing is great fun, but it’s not all fun; if you can’t steel yourself to plow through the un-fun parts, you’ll never finish anything worth the writing. This quality includes both drive, and relentless self-correction --- a continuous search for how to Do It Better, from whatever sources one can find.
Juliet McKenna: Persistence, but in the sense of being willing to learn and to carry on and on until you get something right rather than just being stubbornly convinced your first-draft first novel is a masterpiece despite what everyone else thinks.
L.E. Modesitt: Again, this is an unanswerable question because there are several qualities that a fantasy author must, at a minimum, have: a great understanding of language and grammar, a knowledge of culture and history, the technical ability to write, and the determination and will to keep at writing hour after hour, day after day until it's "done right."
Michael Stackpole: A respect for the power of the genre, a knowledge of how to do research, and a belief that researching reality is the basis for being able to create all that reality is not.
Elizabeth Haydon: A day job.
Sean Russell: Dogged determination comes in handy but I would say you can't express that sense of wonder unless you feel it yourself. If the full moon rising doesn't take your breath away you should be writing something else.
Teresa Edgerton: An interest in all times and places --- if you are going to create imaginary worlds and cultures, you ought to know as much as you can about how the real world works. It may save you from making really stupid, egregious errors.
Terri Windling: An insatiable love of books and language. Reading, reading, reading is the best way to learn to be a good writer --- and wide range of reading, fiction (in and out of the genre), classics, nonfiction, everything. Writers who don't read are handicapping themselves. They're like painters who've never been to art museums. If you love art, why wouldn't you want to see the work of past masters? If you love stories and languages, why wouldn't you want to read and learn from great books past and present?
Margaret Weis: What any writer should possess: self-discipline and a love for words.
Lynn Flewelling: Fortitude.
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