Jane Yolen
Jane Yolen
Jane Hyatt Yolenis an American writer of fantasy, science fiction, and children's books. She is the author or editor of more than 280 books, of which the best known is The Devil's Arithmetic, a Holocaust novella. Her other works include the Nebula Award-winning short story Sister Emily's Lightship, the novelette Lost Girls, Owl Moon, The Emperor and the Kite, the Commander Toad series and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight. She gave the lecture for the 1989 Alice G. Smith Lecture,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionYoung Adult Author
Date of Birth11 February 1939
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Exercise the writing muscle every day.
What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.
Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.
Childrens books change lives. Stories pour into the hearts of children and help make them what they become.
Ideas are the cheapest part of the writing. They are free. The hard part is what you do with ideas you've gathered.
It's never perfect when I write it down the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time. But it always gets better as I go over it and over it.
Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing... the rest will follow.
A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.
Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.
When you realize my best selling books are 'Owl Moon,' the 'How Do Dinosaur' books, and 'Devil's Arithmetic,' how can the public make sense of that! I have fans who think I only write picture books or only write SF and fantasy. I have fanatics of my poetry and are stunned to find out I write prose, too!
The tales of Elfland do not stand or fall on their actuality but on their truthfulness, their speaking to the human condition, the longings we all have for the Faerie Other.
Just write. If you have to make a choice, if you say, 'Oh well, I'm going to put the writing away until my children are grown,' then you don't really want to be a writer. If you want to be a writer, you do your writing... If you don't do it, you probably don't want to be a writer, you just want to have written and be famous—which is very different.
But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. I cannot remember, she whispered to herself. I cannot remember. She's been shorn of memory as brutally as she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason... Gone, all gone, she thought again wildly, no longer even sure what was gone, what she was mourning.