Zitat des Tages von Rebecca Stead:
A lot of my ideas for books come from newspaper articles. But I don't like to be actively looking for ideas.
I felt vulnerable and very much between friends. I remember walking down the hallway and thinking I had no way of knowing what was coming, literally. This wasn't because I had some horrific bullying story, but because of a steady drip of negativity.
'Middle school' is used as shorthand for a time when things change. It's a time a lot of kids feel like they don't even have one good friend.
Every published writer suffers through that first draft because most of the time, that's a disappointment.
As a reader, I much prefer to read a book where people embody all kinds of ideas and everybody is making mistakes.
I try to remember what it was like to be a kid in New York. I lived in different parts of my childhood in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, where 'When You Reach Me' is set, and also in the Midwood section of Brooklyn.
On Sunday, I think the most important thing for me is to just turn my brain off. The idea of not trying is the key, because that's where you're relaxed enough to let your brain make new connections.
There was a boy in my building who was my best friend when I was growing up. There was also a mysterious person on my corner who we called the Laughing Man.
I think we must all feel that there are people out there who know things about our young selves, you know, our early, early lives, that no one else can ever know.
I think that's one of the most important things that books do: not to teach you anything, but to help you teach yourself by just being in the world of the book and having your own thoughts and reactions and noticing your own reactions and thoughts and learning about yourself that way.
I read a whole lot as a child, and, of course, I still read children's books.
During the week,I'm really focused on writing and output. Sunday is a day when I really try not to write at all.
From age nine, my friends and I were on the streets, walking home, going to each other's houses, going to the store. I really wanted to write about that: the independence that's a little bit scary but also a really positive thing in a lot of ways.
There's this trouble with books for me because I'm terrible at thinking of titles. The truth is, even with the titles that I've landed on in the end, they always feel wrong. I think it's because of this whole problem of having to package your book in a certain way.
Mostly what I try to do is build emotion. Only I'd prefer not to do it by telling you about emotion but by pushing that emotion down.
I try to write about internal experience versus the external self. I like to present ideas, but not package them neatly.
I do try to write in ways that reflect reality, and I think that reality is rarely simple.
I asked myself what it was that I wanted from writing and where my connection with books began, and the answer to that question was definitely in childhood, because that's where my connection with reading began.
The wonderful thing about writing fiction is that no one is stopping you. There's no one saying, 'You can't do that.'
Try really, really hard not to judge your own work too harshly.
