Quotes About Authorship

I was writing at a really young age, but it took me a long time to be brave enough to become a published writer, or to try to become a published writer. It's a very public way to fail. And I was kind of scared, so I started out as a ghost writer, and I wrote for other series, like Disney 'Aladdin' and 'Sweet Valley' and books like that.

My goal for children's books is to have them become tableside or bedside classics. To me, it would be awesome to write a book that every kid would end up reading at some point in their life because influencing kids in a positive way at such a young age is really cool.

I always had a passion to write as a young girl.

I write books for all age groups - young kids, teenagers and adults - because I get a range of different ideas.

I had never thought about writing a novel. But I had two young kids, and I realized that if I could write a novel, I could work at home.

When I was submitting my first novel, I had no idea that publishing scams existed. I never encountered any, but I could have - and knowing how easily I might have been taken advantage of makes me determined to protect others from falling into that trap.

The reason I write is because I have questions. What I don't want is for people to forget that I'm a novelist and think I'm a sociologist or something. I don't want to feel trapped into a corner where I don't belong.

You can call someone a lousy writer. You can say you hate their book. You can even call a person 'white trash' but you can't go on television and slander a person's career. It's illegal, even on reality shows.

'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes - 'ideas for stories.' Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly - in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing.

As an author, I had spent years writing my stories on my own in a quiet room. My ideas traveled from my brain to my fingers, executed exactly as I saw fit, never veering from my own intent. TV simply doesn't work that way.

When somebody's face-to-face with you saying, 'I may not have been here had I not read your book,' how do you respond to that? The first several times I traveled, it was almost too much. I was totally grateful, but emotionally, it was really hard.

I often feel that I have a split personality. I love more than anything to be in my study writing, but when it's time to do a book tour, I love that extroverted part, too - talking to people, reading, traveling, going out into the world.

When I realized I wanted to do more writing and less traveling around the world teaching live seminars, I decided to write the first 'Chicken Soup for the Soul(R)' book. I knew I wanted to have 100 stories in the book, so I wrote or edited two stories a week for a year.

After I left Treasury, I think in some ways it was harder to sit there and be writing my book... listening to all the criticism.

I'm a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I'm at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day.

Everywhere I go, I find that writers are treated as if they are invisible, as if they don't matter.

I didn't write my book, 'I Don't Care About Your Band,' in order to give women a brand-new set of dating rules they need to feel terrible about not abiding. I wrote my book to make the women who read it feel good about themselves, and a little more entitled to be treated well by the guys they go out with.

Every really good book was written a little at a time, over time, in tremendous confusion and doubt.

Even after the text is written, there are a tremendous number of stages along the way to the finished book. If a publisher cares about the finished product, none of them will be omitted.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

As an unpublished, nonprofessional writer working on my first novel, I nevertheless had access to extremely talented people who would help make my manuscript better, people who've made careers out of providing careful, constructive criticism to writers. I'm tremendously grateful to them.

Every story I write is different. Some are hard. Some aren't. 'Chronicle' was tremendously easy. I have a hard time comparing my process on different things, but I will say this: The more you write, the better you get at it. That's one of the few things that's markedly true.

Don't try to write to the trend of the moment.

There are other writers who try for subtle and minimalists effects, but I don't travel in that tribe.