Geraldine McCaughrean Quotes

Then one day I thought it would be wonderful to make a whole book, to make my text and my drawings together, and that's how I started doing children's books.

People think writing a children's book is something you could do in an afternoon but it's actually really hard.

Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.

I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'

We always wanted to do a children's book of some form or another.

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Writing for children is an art in itself, and a most interesting one.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

If I ever write a book, it will be called 'Bottle Blonde.'

I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.

I've never really thought of writing books. I've never thought about stories as a part of a collection.

I started writing because I wanted to write scripts, but I wasn't very good at it. Then I started writing short stories, sort of as treatments for the film scripts, and I found I enjoyed writing short stories far more than I enjoyed writing film scripts. Then the short stories got longer and longer and suddenly, I had novels.

The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book.

I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story.

The great thing about making picture books is that you can make absolutely anything you want happen. It's a bit like making a film, but you don't need lots of money for actors and costumes - you just need pens, paper, and your imagination.

Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

I read all the time. Sometimes I get asked if I've thought about writing a novel.

Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.

Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

Writing novels is the most exciting.

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

I don't think I'm a natural novelist. Plot is definitely one of my weaker points. I've been working on it a long time, and it's not getting much better.