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I love writing for young adults because they are such a wonderful audience, they are good readers, and they care about the books they read.

I like to encourage young talented writers to try and help them get published and so forth, but that's all. That's the best I can do.

As a writer, I'm convinced that encouraging children to write fiction, to hook into that marvelous machine called the imagination, has to be good for everyone.

Writing for children isn't easy. Kids will abandon a story that doesn't interest, enchant, delight, thrill, or terrify them. But when you can find a way into a young reader's imagination through something as simple as words on paper, well, there's nothing more satisfying.

I've always written. At the age of six or seven, I would get sheets of A4 paper and fold them in half, cut the edges to make a little eight-page booklet, break it up into squares and put in little stick men with little speech bubbles, and I'd have a spy story, a space story and a football story.

Kids are naturally inventive and curious and creative, but most adults have had that beaten out of them. Writing is a form of play; you have to get rid of all those internal censors that we adults have, the things that say, 'Don't go there, that's not allowed.'

The idea there were kids out there who didn't love to read and write just as much as I did struck me. So I went around schools and tried to make other kids love to read and write.

I am really into how words sound out loud, so I was always the kid who would, like, read the page of the book to herself in her room over and over and over. And Raymond Carver is great for that. Tobias Wolff is an author who is really good for that as well.

I write with teenagers in mind.

Making reading an enjoyable activity for children is a challenge. So I ensure that I write in a way that is fun for children to read.