Literary Birthday – 15 April – Omar Tyree

Happy Birthday, Omar Tyree, born 15 April 1969.

Omar Tyree Quotes

1. My writing’s always been systematic. I come up with a subject, then I come up with the characters that fit the subject, and then you do your research. Whether you have to travel to the places you need to travel, or if the character is a doctor or lawyer or something then you want to do research on that.
2. Next you look at it and say ok, would people be interested in reading this and can I publish this? Then you have to look at what do you want to write opposed to what the people want to read. That’s always going to be a struggle for an author, but you try to negotiate that.
3. I don’t have a particular time of day that I write it just depends but it looks like I’m an afternoon person right now. As for writers block, I tell people all the time that writer’s block is fear of your own words where you just keep editing yourself.
4. People who really write… let it come out understanding that however it comes out is how it comes out and you can always re-write it later.
5. I have two sons myself, and they are both still young. And it’s embarrassing for me as an African-American male writer of more than a dozen adult novels to take my sons to the book stores and find less than a dozen books with brown boys’ faces on them. So my reason for writing children’s books, particularly for urban boys, is the same reason I started writing books for African-American adults more than fifteen years ago. I want to add content to the book shelves that represent our world. And many children’s book publishers have not been very interested in doing that.
6. You have to travel and beat down the doors and have your flyers ready. You have to beat the drum hard and hustle. You got to be hungry, bottom line, hungry out of this world.

Source 1, Source 2 for quotes.

Source for image: TAMMPractice, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Omar_Tyree.jpg

Omar Tyree is an African-American novelist. He has published 16 books and has sold nearly two million copies worldwide. He won a 2001 NAACP Image Award recipient for Outstanding Literature in Fiction, and a 2006 Phillis Wheatley Literary Award winner for Body of Work in Urban Fiction.  He is the author of Flyy Girl.

by Amanda Patterson

Please click here for our Literary Birthday Calendar