Jerry Spinelli Quotes

I think the most important lesson isn't necessarily to try and write a different book every time, or to try and brand yourself and write one specific kind of book, but to write the kind of books you love to read.

I would say if you want to write, write what you care about. I think that's the most important thing. I think if you write what you care about, you stand a better chance of having the reader care about your story.

I don't like writing with real people in mind.

You have to keep your audience in your mind; if you're writing stuff that you know nobody's going to care about then you should rethink what you're doing!

I sit a lot with my lyrics - I don't write just to write or put a line in just to have one. Everything has to mean something to me.

My writing is authentic, and whatever happens in my life is what I write about.

I didn't want to do a book just to do a book. I wanted to do a book that, if you should read it, you might take one thing from it. Until that was clear in my mind, I wasn't going to do one.

I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don't think about how old they are.

I get to tell the most interesting stories I know how to tell with the most interesting sentences I know how to compose - and people who aren't related to me read them. To be paid to write things that matter to me is extraordinary.

If I don't cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it's failed.

Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.

I don't generate a storyline and then fill it out in the course of writing. The story actually generates in the course of the writing. It's one of the reasons I've never been comfortable doing screenplays, because in order to get the contract for the screenplay, you have to sit down and tell them what's going to happen.

You write about what you know.

I just try to write the best story I can, a story I would love to read, and hope that readers feel the same.

I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.

I have to live my books before I write them.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

Every really good book was written a little at a time, over time, in tremendous confusion and doubt.

I like hearing other writers just about the way they approach writing. It gives me energy for my own work. It's weird; I'm always taking notes about fiction when I'm listening to people talk about craft.

I think humor can be an effective way of getting the point across, but there are definitely times where I just write very earnestly.

I feel very protective in the first draft, when all the pieces are coming together. I work in a way that is not linear or chronological at all, even with the short story. I will just be writing bits and pieces, and then when I have all the pieces on the table, that for me is when it feels like the real work begins.

From the beginning, the series has been story driven - I began with a story idea - but research feeds it.

I am never going to write for the sake of writing.