I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
BEVERLY CLEARYThe key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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Otis was inspired by a boy who sat across the aisle from me in sixth grade. He was a lively person. My best friend appears in assorted books in various disguises.
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I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don’t really read children’s books.
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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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I don’t necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that’s most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.
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I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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If we finished our work, the teacher would say, ‘Now don’t read ahead.’ But sometimes I hid the book I was reading behind my geography book and did read ahead. You can hide a lot behind a geography book.
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Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
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In seventh grade…I found a place on the [library]shelf where my book would be if I ever wrote a book, which I doubted.
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Children want to do what grownups do.
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She was not a slowpoke grownup. She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next.
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We didn’t have television in those days, and many people didn’t even have radios. My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening.
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If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
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I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
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