I eat broccoli. I think about the plot. I pace in circles for hours, counter-clockwise, listening to music. I try to think of one detail in the scene I'm about to write that I'm really excited about writing. Until I can come up with that one detail, I pace.
From Matthew Tobin Anderson
I can't tell you how irritating it is to be an atheist in a haunted house.
Older teens tend to write to me and say, 'Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.'
Teens are not like the weird, dumb dwarves you have around your house. They are actually you when you were younger.
Why not write a book which is as sophisticated as a book for an adult, but is about the concerns that teenagers actually have?
I write for teens partially to work out whatever it was that I needed to from my own teenage years.
It's insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should.
If we're going to ask our kids at age 18 to go off to war and die for their country, I don't see any problem with asking them at age 16 to think about what that might mean.
A lot of the drive to make narratives came from having to play by myself as a 5- or 6-year-old in the woods.
One of the series I like is D.M. Cornish's 'Monster Blood Tattoo,' in which he creates a whole language. Kids who are reading that are building a language in their heads. There's no real cognitive difference. I think kids are excited by language, and they're not always given credit for that.
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