Literary Birthday – 24 December – Gillian Cross

Happy Birthday, Gillian Cross, born 24 December 1945.

Gillian Cross Quotes

1. I’ve got two main tips. First, tell the story as well as you can. If you get to the end and you can see things that are wrong – go back and put them right. There’s no point in rewriting for the sake of it, but you’re very lucky if you get everything right first time. I usually have to rewrite a book three or four times.
2. The second tip is – have fun! If you don’t have a good time while you’re writing, how can you expect readers to enjoy themselves? (But that doesn’t mean telling jokes all the time, of course. You can enjoy being sad or serious too.)
3. My office has a wonderful view – a brick wall (it doesn’t distract me).
4. The key thing is to get the stuff down. Once you’ve got it, you can revise it, cut it, expand it or alter it out of all recognition.
5. It usually takes me between five and nine months to write a book, depending on the length. In that time I rewrite it three or four times, and I’ve always spent quite a long time thinking about it before I start.
6. It’s hard to say where my ideas come from. I usually get a picture of a place or a person. Sometimes I get a tiny little scene in my mind – very short, like the trailers you see on television. There’s never very much of an idea to start with, just a little snippet and a very strong feeling that it can grow into a story. Then I ask myself lots of questions about the characters, and I find out what happens by starting to write the story down. I hardly ever know the whole story before I start writing the book.

Gillian Cross is a British author of children’s books. She won the 1990 Carnegie Medal for Wolf and the 1992 Whitbread Children’s Book Award for The Great Elephant Chase. She also wrote The Demon Headmaster series of books that were later turned into television series by the BBC. Visit her website for more information.

Source for Image

Author’s website

http://www.gillian-cross.co.uk/index.html

by Amanda Patterson

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