Literary Birthday – 20 March – Louis Sachar

Happy Birthday, Louis Sachar, born 20 March 1954.

Quotes

1. I write every morning, usually for no more than two hours a day. I never talk about a book until it is finished.
2. My favourite authors became my heroes, and I wanted to be like them.
3. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. Nothing in life is easy. But that’s no reason to give up. You’ll be surprised what you can accomplish if you set your mind to it. After all, you only have one life, so you should try to make the most of it.
4. I try to draw on the feelings I had as a child, or those that I still have, and capture those same feelings in the characters in my books, but under different circumstances.
5. When I find an author I like, I usually read everything that author has written.
6. Most days, it just feels like I’m not accomplishing much. I write for about two hours a day, and most of it just seems like a waste of time. It amazes me how after a year, all those wasted days somehow add up to something.
7. Read, find out what you like to read, and try to figure out what it is about it that makes you like it. You have to rewrite. My first draft of anything I write is really awful.
8. Usually, when I finish the book, I look back and think it was fun to write, but while I’m writing it, it’s not really fun at all.

For more, read Louis Sachar On Writing

Louis Sachar is an American author of children’s books. He is well known for the series Sideways Stories From Wayside School and for Holes which won the 1998 U.S. National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and the 1999 Newbery Medal for the year’s ‘most distinguished contribution to American literature for children’.

Source for Image: Author’s Website

by Amanda Patterson

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