Linda Sue Park Quotes.
A mistake made with good in your heart is still a mistake, but it is one for which you must forgive yourself.
All my books take a long time to research. I spend several months researching before I start writing, and in the middle of writing I often have to stop and look up stuff. At my local library, I am one of the best customers! The research takes several months.
If you’re trying to write about very strong horror, very strong fear or very strong emotion, it’s easy to overwrite it.
I often have trouble falling asleep at night, so when I’m lying in bed I think up stories. That’s where I do a lot of my thinking. I also get a lot of ideas while I’m reading – sometimes reading someone else’s stories will make me think of one of my own.
Each of my books has taken me a different length of time to write – eight months for Seesaw Girl, eight months for Shard, three years for When My Name Was Keoko! The publisher takes another year and a half to work on the book, so altogether each book can take up to three or four years to publish.
My son and I discovered Terry Pratchett’s books together, when he was about eleven years old. He’d be reading on his own and would start to laugh, and then eagerly read the passage aloud to me–and I’d do the same to him! Pratchett’s books became a shared source of delight for us back then, and they still are today.
God bless Interlibrary Loan. I pay a lot of library fines. In the case of ‘A Single Shard,’ I was using books that hadn’t been checked out in 30 years, so I didn’t feel too bad.
Most writers adore their editors, and I’m no exception.
I can give advice to anyone interested in writing in one word: Read! I think it’s much more important to be a reader than to be a writer!
After high school, I went to Stanford University and majored in English. Of course, that gave me a chance to do lots more reading and writing. I also received degrees in London and Dublin – where I moved to be near a charming Irishman who became my husband!
When I’m writing, I try not to think things like, ‘Gosh, I have to finish writing this book.’ Books are very long and it’s easy to get discouraged. Instead I think to myself, ‘Wow, I have this great story idea, and today I’m going to write two pages of it. That’s all – just two pages.’
My first publication was a haiku in a children’s magazine when I was 9 years old. I received one dollar for it! I gave the check to my dad for Christmas, and he framed it and hung it over his desk.
If a man is keeping an idea to himself, and that idea is taken by stealth or trickery-I say it is stealing. But once a man has revealed his idea to others, it is no longer his alone. It belongs to the world.
Reading for writers is like training for athletes.
Libraries hold the wisdom of the world and the stories of the ages – available to everyone, free of charge!
I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That’s the main reason I became a writer.
With a book called ‘Keeping Score,’ I really did want to write a book about the Korean War, because I felt that it is the least understood war in the American cultural imagination. So I set out with the idea that Americans didn’t know much about the Korean War and that I was going to try to fix a tiny bit of that.
Each of my books has taken me a different length of time to write – eight months for ‘Seesaw Girl,’ eight months for ‘Shard,’ three years for ‘When My Name Was Keoko!’ The publisher takes another year and a half to work on the book, so altogether each book can take up to three or four years to publish.
