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If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well.

I always wrote. My parents are writers. It just seemed like something people did.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

There are two questions that you ask yourself as a writer, and one of them is, 'But why?' The question that takes the book forward is, 'What if? What if x y or z happened? How would those characters react?'

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

I think I became a writer because of my love of stories and an inability to stop asking, 'What if?'

When I first began writing, and I told people what I wrote, I'd get a blank stare and sometimes a 'Huh?' They weren't sure what young adult literature was. Now everyone knows.

Even when I think I'm writing really young, they say it's too mature.

I've been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I'm concerned, I am a writer - whether my writing's spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine.