It is truly excellent to have someone believe in you and your ability to write. But I think it is just as helpful to have people who don't believe in you, people who mock you, people who doubt you, people who enrage you. Fortunately, there is never a shortage of this type of person in the world ... write for yourself. Write for the story. And write, also, for all of the people who doubt you. Write for all those people who are not brave enough to do this grand and wondrous thing themselves. Let them motivate you.
Hands down, the biggest thrill is to get a letter from a kid saying, I loved your book. Will you write me another one?
Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness.
I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.
May God strike me down with a hammer on the head before I write a book with a teach-y goal!
I think we sent Tony Fucile pictures of ourselves, photos from like when we were seven years old. That's what he worked from. He captured exactly what we looked like. I'd love to do another one with Alison, not just for the joy of writing, but also for the joy of watching Tony bring it to life with his illustrations. I'm hoping at BEA, or ALA, I'll get to meet Tony and shake his hand and thank him.
So here I am, sending a two-ounce mouse down into a dungeon with a sewing needle to save a human princess, and I don't know how in the world he's going to do it. I have no idea. That was the first time it occurred to me that writing the story was roughly equivalent to Despereaux's descent into the dungeon. I was tremendously aware of that as I was writing. I thought, "I have to be brave or else I'm not going to be able to tell it." But it's the only way that I can write. If I know what's going to happen, I'm not interested in telling the story.
I think I'm succinct to the point of trying to write the two-word novel. Editing my work almost never means taking anything out but rather adding, because I'm always stripping down. I tend to under-write rather than over-write.
Writing is seeing. It is paying attention.
For children: I'm writing a picture book about the Big Dipper and a novel about a cricket, a firefly and a vole. For grownups: I'm writing poems.
Sometimes strange and wonderful things will pop into my head. And sometimes I will see something in the world that is the beginning of a story. I always have a notebook with me so that I can write down what I see and hear.
As Elmore Leonard says, I write to find out what happens.
When I was a kid I loved to read, but I didn't write and I didn't create imaginary worlds. So, if one student walks away thinking, "She's obviously just an ordinary person, yet she gets to make her living doing what she wants to do. Maybe that applies to me, too," then I feel like my time has been well spent.
We [me and Alison McGhee] probably wouldn't have said that when we were writing the stories, but it is so apparent to me in the finished product. For me, looking at Bink, it's like looking at myself on the page in a way that I've never experienced with any other book that I've written.
The words, "I have a dog named Winn-Dixie," popped into my head in the voice of a small girl with a southern accent. I'd been writing long enough at that point to know not to ignore that kind of red flag. The next day, I put aside what I'd been working on, started with that one sentence, and followed it all the way to the end.
It is always just telling a story, regardless of the age of the reader. Except, if I'm writing something for kids, I know there has to be hope. I don't necessarily feel that responsibility for adults, but I emphatically feel it for children. That's the only difference. There's no syntax difference. There's no semantics difference. There's no thematic difference.
If I am just home and writing, I become very strange.
I was born in Philadelphia and currently live in Minneapolis. I write for both children and adults.
While we were working, we were writing about a tall girl and a short girl, which we thought was funny, because Alison's [McGhee] tall and I'm short.
The Tale of Despereaux came at the request of Luke, my friend's then-eight-year-old son, who asked, "Write for me the story of an unlikely hero with exceptionally large ears."
A typical day for me is I get up at 6:00, the coffeemaker goes on automatically and the computer gets turned on. I pour a cup of coffee, listen to Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac, and then I write.
I need to write, and I can't write when I'm on the road.
My goal is two pages a day, five days a week. I never want to write, but I'm always glad that I have done it. After I write, I go to work at the bookstore.
I was over at Alison's [McGhee], I think we were playing Scrabble. I remember we were both complaining - yeah, we sound like whiners - about how hard writing is, and how we didn't have a story to work on. Alison said, 'Why don't we work on writing something together,' and I said, 'Eh, I don't know if I could work that way.' She said, 'Well, just show up here and we'll see,' and I said, 'Well, what would it be about?' She said, 'Duh, it'd be about a tall girl and a short girl.' So I agreed to come and try it for a day.
I didn't know at the time I was writing Because of Winn-Dixie where the story came from, but in retrospect I can see that it was a response to a terribly harsh winter here in Minnesota.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: