Mal Peet Quotes

I never wrote my books especially for children.

I don't think too much about the audience when I'm writing... I'm aware that 'Holes' was read by kids as young as 8, up to adults.

I don't differentiate in the way that the genre creators want differentiation to be made. I feel that I have never written children's or YA stories particularly.

Young readers are the most challenging, demanding, and rewarding of audiences. Adults often ask why I write for the younger set. My reply: 'I can't think of anyone I'd rather write for.'

I tend not to think about audience when I'm writing. Many people who read 'The Giver' now have their own kids who are reading it. Even from the beginning, the book attracted an audience beyond a child audience.

All of my books, which are supposedly, I mean they're called YA novels, my hope is that adults would find no reason not to read them if they read them.

I don't write for children. I write and someone says it's for children.

I have a lot of teenage readers and readers in their early twenties. My writing style appeals to them. And if they look at my picture on the back of the book, they don't see someone who looks like their mother.

I'm getting a lot of mail from readers, and I'd say 90% seem to be from adults, which amazes me. But then again, I can only write what I imagine I'd like to read, and I'm an adult, so maybe it's not so surprising after all.

There's a really generous readership with YA.

I've always assumed from the beginning that I had relatively few contemporaries among my readership. Not that I was consciously writing for a younger audience but that what I was doing interested a younger audience, or at least threatened them less.

I think about my audience when I write, to some extent. Thinking of writing for young adults, I try to keep the stories moving, never a dull moment, to hold their interest.

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.

I mean, I don't write for kids.

It's - I write the books and let the market find who reads it. I guess a young adult is anywhere from ten to fifteen.

The novel space is a pure space. I'm nobody once I go into that room. I'm not gay, I'm not bald, I'm not Irish. I'm not anybody. I'm nobody. I'm the guy telling the story, and the only person that matters is the person reading that story, the target. It's to get that person to feel what I'm trying to dramatize.

With a young-adult series, you need to get a lot of books out on the market quickly. Teenagers aren't going to wait years and years for the next book.

Writing for young children I find I often use particular jokes with words and exaggerated, funny events, but some of these haunt the more complex stories for older children too.

For me, writing for younger audiences and writing for adults uses two different halves of my brain.

I think more people are going to continue reading YA as well as reading other books because they have learned that they can find books there which they will truly love: a teenage protagonist is close enough to adult so readers of whichever age can sympathise and empathise with them.

You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart.

The distinction has blurred between young adult and adult books. Some of the teen books have become more sophisticated.

But I don't sit down and think: this is meant for children.

I didn't 'decide' to write YA, per se. But every time I thought of a story, it featured characters 15, 16, 17.

I suspect that authors who start their careers writing for an adult audience - and who eventually produce a young adult novel or two - are more common than authors who begin by writing for young adults and who then gravitate toward composing something for an adult audience.