Quotes from Children's and Teen Fiction Authors
Writing for Children and Teens |
The Writing Process |
Write from Within
On Reading, Readers and Books, and Reading and Writers
On Writing and Writers
Writing for Children and Teens
You have to write whichever book it is that wants to be written. And then, if it's going to be too difficult for
grown-ups, you write it for children.
-- Madeleine L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and many other books for teens
I think if what you're writing is realistic fiction for teens, then you need to reflect their lives. The one thing I have heard from teenagers is that they want honesty.
-- Kathy Stinson, author of Becoming Ruby, Red is Best, and many other books for teens and children
I love writing for teenagers because I think they're such an honest, open audience. They'll tell you if they love a story and they'll call you out if something is just plain lame.
-- Melissa Walker, author of the Violet on the Runway series and Lovestruck Summer
Children’s books are the mother’s milk of literature. They should nourish and inspire, and it wouldn’t hurt if they protected kids from infections and allergies too! No one should think that writing for children is easy or trivial. Our children deserve the best we can give them.
-- Susan Williams Beckhorn, author of Wind Rider , The Kingfisher's Gift, and other books for children and teens
I will not take a young reader through a story and in the end abandon him. That is, I will not write a book that closes in despair. I cannot, will not, withhold from my young readers the harsh realities of human hunger and suffering and loss, but neither will I neglect to plant that stubborn seed of hope that has enabled our race to outlast wars and famines and the destruction of death.
-- Katherine Paterson, A Sense of Wonder: On Reading and Writing Books for Children, author of Bridge to Terabithia, The Great Gilly Hopkins, Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom, and many other books for children and teens
I think a children's writer has a dual responsibility--you must entertain the child, it must be something they enjoy reading, but I think also because we're adult and we have had experiences we need to kind of show a way through what seems to be a hopeless tangle at times. I don't necessarily mean a happy ending, because happy endings aren't always right for a book, more often than not, but the possibility of a solution I think is important.
-- Berlie Doherty, Talking Books: Children's Authors Talk about the Craft, Creativity and Process of Writing, author of Deep Secret, The Girl Who Saw Lions, and many other books for children and teens
It is not necessary to have children of your own in order to write children´s books. The only condition is that one was once a child oneself - and then try to remember what it was like.
-- Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking, Pippi Goes on Board, and many other books for children
But what the young adult novel does that the adult novel doesn’t is get into the heart and soul of the teenager as a teenager. Not as an adult reminiscing, nor as the subject of a narrator, but as a teenager with teenage concerns that have nothing to do with adult memories because they are being lived at that moment.
-- M. Rachel Plummer, in "What Makes A Young Adult Novel A Young Adult Novel?", author of The Painting in the Attic
I think kids are the most important audience. They are passionate about life and that passion translates to reading. They may not remember the plot or the character or the setting of a particular book when they're thirty years old. But they will remember the feeling of wonder of words, and that's why I write for children. To touch their passions.
-- Sharelle Byars Moranville, in "Writing Middle-Grade Novels that Reach Out and Touch Young Readers", author of Over the River, The Purple Ribbon, and other books for children and teens
So this is always the key: you have to write the book you love, the book that's alive in your heart. That's the one you have to write.
-- Lurlene McDaniel, author of Sometimes Love Isn't Enough, Prey, and other books for teens
The best children's book writers are not people who have kids, but people who write from the child within themselves.
-- Andrea Brown
I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe.
-- Madeleine L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and many other books for teens
Children long for models of effective action: "What could a kid really do?" ...Really doing something is hard. It's just because children feel so little power that they need the hope that an individual--that they themselves--can act and accomplish.
-- Judy K. Morris, Writing Fiction for Children: STORIES ONLY YOU CAN TELL, author of Nightwalkers and The Kid Who Ran for Principal
...I believe that words, too, are necessities--and to give the children of the world the words they need is, in a real sense, to give them life and growth and refreshment.
-- Katherine Paterson, A Sense of Wonder: On Reading and Writing Books for Children, author of Bridge to Terabithia, The Great Gilly Hopkins, Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom, and many other books for children and teens
I subscribe to the belief that "if you want to send a message, use Western Union." In other words, if the values or moral messages are too overt, the story will suffer and no one will read it (which paradoxically means they won't get the message either). Children don't like to be preached to any more than adults do. On the other hand, while I always try and tell a good story, I can't help but infuse my moral and ethical views into any book I write, consciously or not.
-- Garth Nix, "A Conversation With Garth Nix," at writerswrite.com, author of Mister Monday (Keys to the Kingdom, Book 1), The Abhorsen Chronicles, and other books for children and teens
Children like to read about success, whether it's winning the hand of the best princess or prince, saving a life, helping people who need it, beating the other team in the game of the year, or discovering another universe.
-- Janet and Isaac Asimov
You must write for children in the same way you do for adults, only better.
-- Maxim Gorky
"First do no harm," says the Hippocratic oath for physicians. If writers of children's books had to take an oath it might begin, "First tell the truth."
-- William Zinsser
The Writing Process
When a good story idea hits, it settles in my body and takes over completely. The character occupies my mind, inhabits me, makes unreasonable demands. I find the engine of a story inside myself, where experience and imagination connect.
-- Karen Krossing, author of Take the Stairs, Pure, and other books for children and teens
Delay is natural to a writer. I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor - as though not until everything in the world is lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonable expect me to set a word down on paper.
-- E. B. White, author of Charlotte's Web, The Trumpet of the Swan, and other books for children
Well, some days I find it impossible to begin, but I always spend my four hours down there and I may read magazines, I may do a crossword puzzle or check all the baseball averages or get some work done; there are days when it goes and days when it doesn't go. But I think I have to go every day in order to earn the good days.
-- Mordecau Richler
I don't worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and working . . . coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write." There's no difference on paper between the two . . . you sit down and you just have conditioned yourself to: now it's writing time and you have a deadline sitting out there somewhere and you're going to do the very best you can here at this moment; and so you do it.
-- Frank Herbert
Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write. You feel dull, you have a headache, nobody loves you, write. If all feels hopeless, if that famous "inspiration" will not come, write.
-- J. B. Priestley
I'm in good form, taking no interest in things, neglecting clothes, meals, company, and feeling calm and stable as I write. Each word has broken out of its shell; sentences come thrusting up straight from my breast. I just copy them down.
-- Bertolt Brecht
I enjoy the process of writing. The torment comes in getting my bottom on the chair and in front of the typewriter.
-- Caryl Rivers
Writing every book is like a purge; at the end of it one is empty . . . like a dry shell on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in again.
-- Daphne DuMaurier
Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived.
-- Helen Keller
I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted. When I cease to be carried along, when I no longer feel as though I were taking down dictation, I stop.
-- Francois Mauriac
Write from Within
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Powers (Annals of the Western Shore), Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, and many other books for teens
For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.
-- George Orwell
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
-- Kurt Vonnegut
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
-- D. H. Lawrence
Keep in mind that the person to write for is yourself. Tell the story that you most desperately want to read.
-- Susan Isaacs
What lasts in the reader's mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what's it doing there? Make it do it's job or cut it without mercy or remorse.
-- Isaac Asimov
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart...
-- William Wordsworth
New writers are often told, "Write what you know." I would broaden that by saying, "Write what you know emotionally."
-- Marjorie Franco
Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered pot holder.
-- Raymond Chandler
You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.
-- Marianne Moore
It's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.
-- L. P. Hartley
On Reading, Readers and Books, and Reading and Writers
Reading is to writing what inhaling is to exhaling. Just as it's impossible to breathe out without first taking a breath in, it's impossible to write well without first taking in deep, gusty, refreshing drafts of the writing of others. All those ideas and ways of using language simmer in your brain, undergoing chemical changes, until--presto!--you have the tools with which to develp your own voice. Never forget to breathe.
-- Susan Williams Beckhorn, author of Wind Rider, The Kingfisher's Gift, and other books for children and teens
I know I'm reading a good book when the story pulls me in and compels me to read on, until I get to the end, devastated it's over.
-- Karen Krossing, author of Take the Stairs, Pure, and other books for children and teens
Write what you want to read. The person you know best in this world is you. Listen to yourself. If you are excited by what you are writing, you have a much better chance of putting that excitement over to a reader.
-- Robin McKinley, author of Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast, Chalice, and many other books for teens
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.
-- E. B. White, author of Charlotte's Web, The Trumpet of the Swan, and other books for children
"Please," she whispered as she opened the book, "please get me out of here just for an hour or so, please take me far, far away."
-- Cornelia Funke, Inkheart, author of Inkheart, Inkspell, and other books for children
Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.
-- Cornelia Funke, Inkheart, author of Inkheart, Inkspell, and other books for children
On Writing and Writers
All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation - it is the Self escaping into the open.
-- E.B. White, author of Charlotte's Web, The Trumpet of the Swan, and other books for children
Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.
-- Anna Freud
What I like in a good author isn’t what he says, but what he whispers.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith
The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
-- E. L. Doctorow
