Literary Birthday – 3 October – Sara Zarr

Happy Birthday, Sara Zarr, born on 3 October 1970.

Sara Zarr Quotes

1. Your greatest creation is your creative life. It’s all in your hands.
2. It’s hard to say when my interest in writing began, or how. My mother read to my sister and me every night, and we always loved playing make-believe games. I had a well-primed imagination.
3. The one reader I’m trying to please as I write is me, and I’m pretty difficult to please.
4. I was a ‘learn by doing’ writer – I never took any formal writing classes. So it took a long time to figure things out and find my voice.
5. When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin.
6. We write in ways that, we generally hope, reflect real life, or at least look familiar to humans. And in life, recurring themes are a recurring theme. We never quite conquer a pet vice or a relationship pattern or a communication habit. We’re haunted by our particular demons.
7. It’s hard to say when my interest in writing began, or how. My mother read to my sister and me every night, and we always loved playing make-believe games. I had a well-primed imagination.
8. I don’t like to do too much psychological research because it might turn a character into a patchwork.
9. My books usually end where they began. I try to bring characters back to a point that is familiar but different because of the growth that they have gone through.

Sara Zarr is an American writer. Her first novel, Story of a Girl, was a 2007 National Book Award finalist. It was made into a television movie in 2017. She is the award-winning author of twelve books, including Sweethearts and Gem & Dixie, and most recently Kyra, Just for Today, and Goodbye from Nowhere. She has written essays, creative nonfiction, and short fiction for Image, Hunger Mountain online, Response, Gather, and Relief Journal as well as for several anthologies. She is also a MacDowell Fellow and has served as a judge for the National Book Award.

Source for image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sara_Zarr.jpg
Source for quotes: BrainyQuote

by Amanda Patterson
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