Cecily von Ziegesar Quotes

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

The puppet characters were combinations of people I had known and to some degree aspects of my own personality. Weird was based on someone I knew in Chicago. Dirty Dragon was based on a good friend I had in Indianapolis.

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

Well, I think in my own work the subject matter usually deals with characters I know, aspects of myself, friends of mine - that sort of thing.

In 'A Likely Story,' I wanted to recreate the events, the mood, and the imagery of my life as a teenager. I was thirty-seven when I wrote it.

I've always enjoyed the teen angst thing. I had a lot of teen angst as I was growing up, so I think I have a lot to say about it through characters before I have to move on.

For example, I noticed that every single kid in the high school in 'The Death-Ray' is based on somebody I went to high school with.

I loved everything about being ten, eleven, and twelve years old, and seem to make most of my heroines and heroes that age so I can reexperience all those pitfalls and wonderful discoveries. It helps me to figure out my own life when I write from that eleven year old place!

With "Margaret," I remember clearly it was, you know because I did remember it clearly. I was young. I was young in terms of experience and what did I know about and I had an incredible memory from my own childhood. And so it never occurred to me to write for any other age group. And I thought I'm going to write a book and I'm going to tell the truth.

I actually love writing for teens best. I had such an awful time in my own teen years - I love having the chance to relive them through my fiction.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

I've certainly been someone who has loved to mine the trials and tribulations of growing up in general, and the people who are in our lives, and I don't mind pulling from them and writing things down on my phone that my family says.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people.

But, on another level it's really sort of this really cool coming of age story, it reminds me of like The Breakfast Club or something like that, if I can be so bold to associate with The Breakfast Club.

There are always parts of me that come out in the characters that I play - it's the only thing I have to work with and to draw off of.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

You just write what you know, and I know what it's like to be a teenager in 1993,, and I'm a woman, so I'm definitely going to write from that point of view.

What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.

When I got near teen age, I was so happy with my friends and the African-American culture that I couldn't imagine not being part of it.

I'm always inspired to write, and it's usually my own life experiences that inspire me.

Inevitably I draw on my own relationships when I write, so if I'm writing about a fight between a husband and his wife, of course I'm going to think about a recent fight with my husband. Or if I'm writing about sisters, of course I'm going to think about my sister.

I'd never made a teen comedy in my life.

Going back to my own past as a reader, I was a big, big reader of romances, particularly as a teenager, the age that my books are aimed at.

I think a handful of the roles that I've gotten to play are characters whom I've lived that are like younger versions of me but who are maybe more naive and a little bit wilder than when I was. And I've gotten to play 16 and 17 when I was a little bit older, so I got to pull from experience.