Success needs no explanation. Failure does not have one that matters.
I wouldn't mind being a track and field coach.
I think I had a particular moment when I was 15 years old. I read 'Crime and Punishment,' and that book just, I think, more than any other book made me want to be a writer, 'cause it was the first time that I hadn't just entered a book, but a book had entered me.
I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.
I live in Cullowhee, North Carolina. That's where I teach, at Western Carolina University. That region is where my family has lived for a long time and that region is my landscape.
I don't even have a choice. Rachel thought how that was pretty much true of everything now, that you got one choice at the beginning but if you didn't choose right, and she hadn't, things got narrow real quick. Like trying to wade a river, she thought. You take a wrong step and set your foot on a wobbly rock or in a drop-off and you're swept away, and all you can do then is try to survive.
Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place.
Dry bread at home is better then rost meate abroad.
It is the burning lava of the soul that has a furnace within--a very volcano of grief and sorrow-it is that burning lava of prayer that finds its way to God. No prayer ever reaches God's heart which does not come from our hearts.
There really is no difference in the actual writing or plotting. I choose to tell different stories for the younger reader and, of course, I would never put sex and extreme violence in a YA book. But writing for adults and children requires the same care and attention.
Obviously the whole Wayward thing hasn't been explained to you properly. You don't have any superpowers. You can't leap over tall buildings in a single bound or fight Dark Casters with your magic cat. Basically, you're a glorified tour guide who's no better equipped to face a bunch of Dark Casters than Mary P. over here -Ridley