Lois Lowry Quotes

The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.

I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written.

When you're writing, you think: How does intimacy happen in the work? You don't know who your reader is, woman, man, child, black person, Asian, who knows?

Anyone who tries to write a memoir needs to keep in mind that what's interesting to you isn't necessarily interesting to a reader.

Make 'em laugh; make 'em cry; make 'em wait.

The trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they'd word something or how they'd inflect it.

And I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.

I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.

There comes a time in every writer's life when it becomes necessary to recognize what people really care about.

You always hope an audience will respond to something you've done, but there's no way of knowing whether or not they will.

I don't know what makes a good feature story. I've always assumed that if it was a story that interested or amused me, that it would have the same impact on other people.

For me as a writer, it's so joyful to know that someone hears and responds to what I write.

The first tour an artist does is a strange one... because you can never tell how the audience is going to react.

When you write, you put your thoughts in the public space. You get both positive and negative feedback.

You can't control how an audience responds to something. It's up to them.

When you write, you are alone. It can be a bit of a shock later to discover that people have read what you've written!

It's tough to know what I'm going to write about. I never really know until it starts happening.

I follow only one rule in my writing, and that is to be interesting. If the story is interesting to you, the writer, then it will probably be interesting to somebody else.

Sometimes improv doesn't work on TV because the audience had heard the thing that was shouted and they're very much alive, the audience in the room - they're alive in that moment. Whereas the audience sat at home on the sofa, it feels like it's part of a party that they haven't been invited to.

It is very difficult for anyone to predict how a film will do. It depends on so many things: the mood of the audience, the state of their mind at the time, how they have reacted to the whole treatment.

As an author, you think you know where the good parts and the bad parts are. And then you read to a group of children, and you learn when you're boring them, and you hurry through those sections to get to the parts where they're interested again. You start to get a sense of your story's rhythm and flow.

One of the things I've learned is you can't really control what an audience is going to feel.

You care a lot about these stories you're writing, and you hope that someone else will care, too.

I had many doubts while writing my autobiography. I wasn't sure if anyone would be interested to read about my life.

It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on.