I don't plot my novels - I move along with my characters.
One professor in college told me flat out I wasn't good enough to enter the creative writing program. I saved that letter and promised myself I would send it back to her when my first book came out.
I've reread 'The Secret Garden' every year as an adult. I have a battered copy on my bookshelf - it's really quite a mess! The experience of reading the novel keeps deepening for me.
I had a blog where I tried to be transparent while giving away nothing. I tweeted and Facebooked badly. As a writer, your 'voice' is your calling card, yet my voice was becoming indistinguishable from billions of other voices.
I pretty much always knew I wanted to be a writer. I was writing goofy stories when I was 7 or 8. That was what I call 'wishful-thinking writing.' I grew up in the city and always wanted a horse, but there was no way I was getting a horse. So I wrote all these stories about kids who had horses. It's still fun entering these other worlds.
I write about two hours a day, and I write in fits and spurts - 45 minutes here, a half-hour there - and when I get stuck, which happens often, I take the dogs for a walk. But during the time when I'm not actually writing, I'm thinking.
A lot of times, when I go back to books I loved when I was young, I don't quite understand what it was that I loved about them. Rereading 'The Secret Garden,' I felt a lot like Mary feels when she visits her garden.
I resisted children's writing for a long time. I saw myself as a writer of literary fiction. But I had so much more fun writing kids' books.
Books are such quiet things - created in silence, read in silence - yet publishing a book has become a very noisy business. I've been noisy, too. I felt like I had to be in order to connect with my readers.
If E.B. White were writing in 2013, would there be a 'Charlotte's Web' trailer and an @SomePig Twitter account? I doubt it. Yet, in a way, he'd be missing out because I'm beginning to think that some of this noise is worth making - and some of it is worth hearing, too.
