I feel like it's important every once in a while to estrange ourselves from the familiar to remind ourselves of the potentialities of people, how many different ways there are of being.
We love fantasy novels in which the characters think that they're peasants but turn out to be princes and kings.
I can't tell you how irritating it is to be an atheist in a haunted house.
Why not write a book which is as sophisticated as a book for an adult, but is about the concerns that teenagers actually have?
Teens are not like the weird, dumb dwarves you have around your house. They are actually you when you were younger.
A lot of the drive to make narratives came from having to play by myself as a 5- or 6-year-old in the woods.
It's insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should.
If we're going to ask our kids at age 18 to go off to war and die for their country, I don't see any problem with asking them at age 16 to think about what that might mean.
Older teens tend to write to me and say, 'Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.'
I write for teens partially to work out whatever it was that I needed to from my own teenage years.
I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.
Occasionally people ask me how it is I write different types of things, and my answer to that is it's very natural. You get bored writing one kind of thing all the time.
I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.
One of the series I like is D.M. Cornish's 'Monster Blood Tattoo,' in which he creates a whole language. Kids who are reading that are building a language in their heads. There's no real cognitive difference. I think kids are excited by language, and they're not always given credit for that.
I completely love music. I used to be the music critic at 'The Improper Bostonian.' It's just something I've always loved very deeply.
The bedroom in my apartment is far too small to hold a nightstand. There is, however, this bookshelf. Yes, I stow whatever I'm reading on the lower shelf, but more importantly, it's where I keep a collection of ghost books.
All of my books, which are supposedly, I mean they're called YA novels, my hope is that adults would find no reason not to read them if they read them.
Certain elements of teen life that, 10 years ago, were very important to me still, are becoming less so as I get older. I mean, I've kinda gotten over, I guess I'm saying, the fact that I had trouble getting a date for the prom.
I eat broccoli. I think about the plot. I pace in circles for hours, counter-clockwise, listening to music. I try to think of one detail in the scene I'm about to write that I'm really excited about writing. Until I can come up with that one detail, I pace.
Sometimes reading other writers helps. You learn some little technique that turns out to be useful, or simply are reinspired by the amazing things others do.
