Literary Birthday – 3 September – Jenny Han

Happy Birthday, Jenny Han, born on 3 September 1980.

Jenny Han Quotes

1. I just write the story as it comes to me, and my main objective is always to tell the truth.
2. I love creating characters more than anything. I feel like they are separate from me. But in every character I write, there is something of me in them.
3. The truth is, no book will ever feel good enough or done enough, but there’s a point when you just have to say, I’ve done the best I can…and then release it into the world. Remember that only you can tell this story from your specific point of view. That’s what makes a story special.
4. I want my books to look like the real world, and the real world is populated by all kinds of people. I think diversity in young adult literature is very important because it reflects what the world really looks like, and that it’s a larger experience. It’s not just one narrow experience. I was thinking about that.
5. People want to be entertained. People want to get lost in the story, and whatever that story is, you have the right to enjoy that.
6. I always wrote stories and stuff and read like crazy as a kid. But at first I never thought that it was possible to be a writer, just because it seemed like a really dream job. It seemed so impractical, and it wasn’t until I went to college and took a class that I thought that maybe I could do this.
7. My advice would be to find your own voice and really hone that voice and point of view. That’s really the thing that makes you unique from everybody else. I think 10 different people can write a story about kids fighting to the death or a kid with cancer. It would be 10 different stories because they have different backgrounds and a different set of eyes.
8. You need to read a lot of stuff and hear other people’s voices because you can zero in on what works.

Jenny Han is an American #1 New York Times bestselling author of young adult fiction. She has written The Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy and the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before series. She adapted The Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy into a TV series for Prime Video. The To All the Boys trilogy was adapted into a Netflix film series. She’s also the creator and executive producer of XO Kitty, a To All the Boys spinoff series. Her books have been published in more than 30 languages. Follow her on Instagram.

Goodreads and RonReads

Image Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jenny_Han_at_BookCon_-_2019_(26746)_(cropped).jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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