Time & Perspective Quote by R. A. Salvatore

There’s a quiet defiance in the way Salvatore frames “giving up” as a logistical pause, not a creative surrender. The line sounds practical, even mild, but it carries the obsessive heartbeat of genre authorship: the work doesn’t stop just because the market, timing, or confidence does. “I gave up the notions of publishing” treats publication as an external notion - an industry-facing ambition that can be shelved - while “I never stopped editing and refining” casts the manuscript as a private covenant. He isn’t describing inspiration; he’s describing stamina.

The subtext is about control. Publishing depends on gatekeepers, luck, trends, and the emotional bruising of rejection. Editing is the one lever the writer can always pull. Salvatore’s syntax quietly reassigns agency from the marketplace back to the desk. The book becomes a long-term project not because he romanticizes struggle, but because he can’t leave it alone. That’s not sentimentality; it’s compulsion with a craft vocabulary.

The context matters: 1987 sits in a pre-internet publishing world where “ready to go out again” meant literal resubmission, re-querying, re-entering the same locked doors with a sharper key. For a fantasy writer who would go on to become a major name, the anecdote functions as origin mythology - not the lightning bolt, but the grind. It’s also a subtle argument for revision as identity: the writer is the person who keeps returning, convinced the next pass will make the work finally legible to others.