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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.
I know I'm writing better now than I ever did for adults because I'm writing for an audience who know that they don't know everything.
I've always been drawn to writing for young readers. The books that I read growing up remain in my mind very strongly.
I got my first whiff of what big-time adult literature was all about when I was in 8th grade. I got it from Mark Linn-Baker. You know - the guy from 'Perfect Strangers.'
I started writing seriously when I was a teenager, around 14 years old.
It feels presumptuous to think of writing for adults.
I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.
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.
I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously.
I always wrote. My parents are writers. It just seemed like something people did.