Kate DiCamillo Quotes

I was taking my first uncertain steps towards writing for children when my own were young. Reading aloud to them taught me a great deal when I had a great deal to learn. It taught me elementary things about rhythm and pace, the necessary musicality of text.

I'm not as worried about the process of writing, simply because I think I've got that one down, you know? I think I know what brings specificity to these ideas, what brings specificity to the genre elements, or anything else, and it's personal emotions.

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.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.

I don't much believe in the idea of characters. I write with words, that is all. Whether those words are put in the mouth of this or that character does not matter to me.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

My novels are all ideas.

Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.

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

No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.

As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.

'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.

I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I've always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story's larger rhythms, such as sentence and paragraph length, placement of flashbacks and dialogue.

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.

Writing is not like acting, where you can pull these little stunts that create a particular effect. Words are all it is about, and the way you use words has to be individual and particular to you.

David Milch, twice I got lectures from him about the theory of writing. I told my wife one night when I got home, 'I feel like I'm being paid to sit at the feet of Aristotle.'

A novel is not a rant.

A short story is one idea; a novel is a whole soup of them.

I'm the kind of writer who thinks style is just as important as the story being told.

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

Fill your pages with details. Work hard to get the right word.