Writers Write Is All About Writing
Writers Write Is All About Writing
April Henry

Literary Birthday – 14 April – April Henry

Happy Birthday, April Henry, born on 14 April 1959.

April Henry Quotes

  1. Write regularly. Write every day, or every weekend. Start by keeping a journal or doing the exercises in Writing Down the Bones. Make writing a habit. Don’t wait for inspiration. Once you are published, you’ll need to make deadlines. (April Henry Writing Tips)
  2. Read, read, read. (April Henry Writing Tips)
  3. Get some distance from your writing. Once you think you’re done, try to put a piece aside for at least two weeks. Then when you do pick it up again, read it aloud while imagining that you are reading it to an editor at a publishing house. What works and what doesn’t? Truman Capote was right when he said, “Good writing is rewriting.” (April Henry Writing Tips)
  4. You can always make bad writing better. You can’t improve nothing. (April Henry Writing Tips)
  5. You don’t have to write what you know. Write what you want to know—and then do your research to get it right. (April Henry Writing Tips)
  6. The trick to regularly having books published is to have a regular routine for writing them. When I was working full time, I just fit in my writing when I could, at about the same time each day. I tried to write 45 minutes a day, usually after work. Sometimes it was less. Sometimes a lot less. But somehow it added up, just doing it day after day after day. I wrote about a book a year that way. (April Henry Writing Tips)
  7. If you really want to be a writer, force yourself to finish a story, rather than abandoning story after story to chase after a new idea, or just polishing the first chapter over and over. (April Henry Writing Tips)
  8. I do a lot of research to get the details right in my novels. I know how to get out of duct tape, zip ties, rope, and handcuffs. I know how a blind character could use their cane to disarm a guy holding a gun. I know how to run in handcuffs, how to open a door with a credit card, how to pick locks, how to craft a disguise, how to get a stranger to give me a ride or let me borrow their cell phone, how to make fake IDs, how to steal a car, how to shoot a handgun and machine gun, how to photograph a crime scene, how to choke someone, how to search a building, and how to fight back if attacked in my car. (April Henry Bio)
  9. In a mystery, the reader discovers, along with the sleuth, who the killer or the do-er of the evil deed is. In a thriller, the story question is—will the main character make it out alive? (April Henry FAQs)
  10. Don’t spend a lot of time setting the stage. Start with something puzzling, mysterious, scary, new, interesting. Start with the day everything changed. (April Henry Writing Tips)

April Henry is the New York Times-bestselling American author of 31 mysteries and thrillers for teens and adults. In 1999, Henry’s fourth book, Circles of Confusion, was published by HarperCollins. It was short-listed for the Agatha Award and the Anthony Award. Her first young adult novel, Shock Point was an ALA Quick Pick. Henry’s first stand-alone thriller was Learning to Fly. In 2025, When We Go Missing was published, and 2026 will see the publication of In The Blood. The award-winning writer is known for meticulously researching her novels to get the details right. Click here for a list of crazy things April Henry has done in the name of research.

Source for image: April Henry, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:April-henry-vert_orig.jpg


by Amanda Patterson

Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: Literary Birthday Calendar

Posted on: 31st March 2026
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