I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.
If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.
I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.
To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.
Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

























