Literary Birthday – 27 March – Patricia Wrede

Happy Birthday, Patricia Wrede, born 27 March 1953.

Patricia Wrede Quotes

1. Nine times out of ten, talking is a way of avoiding doing things.
2. First, write every day, whether you feel like it or not, even if it’s only a little bit — a paragraph or a sentence. You learn to write by writing, just as you would learn to play the piano by practising a lot. Most people don’t like hearing this, but writing is work, and it takes skill and practice, just like any other art. Also, no job is 100% fun, and writing is no exception.
3. Second, get really good at the boring technical bits: learn how to type, to spell, to write a grammatical sentence in your sleep. This is terribly important, though a surprising number of people seem to think they can ignore it.
4. Third, read a lot — and not just the kind of thing you love and want to write, but a little of everything. As a reader, you can love fantasy or science fiction and not want to write anything else, but as a writer, you need to know what else is out there and how it works.
5. Finally, have a life. It is hard to make anything in a book sound interesting if you aren’t really interested in anything in real life.
6. Authors are notoriously bad judges of their own work, especially when it’s fresh. Either you think it’s great when it’s terrible, or you think it’s terrible when it’s really great. The thing is to remember that you have to get it down on paper before you can fix it. First drafts are not required to be good enough to publish; that’s what revisions are for. And it’s never the book in your head… but sometimes it turns out to be a better one.
7. Many, if not most, of the best and most lasting children’s books have multiple levels, some of which are not fully accessible to their most likely readers…at least, not on their first read-through at age eight or ten or fifteen.

Read more here

Patricia Wrede is an American fantasy writer. She is the author of The Enchanted Forest Chronicles series for young adults, which began with Dealing with Dragons. Her first novel, Shadow Magic, introduced Lyra, a magical world in which she set four more novels. Her other series include the Enchanted Forest Chronicles; the Cecelia and Kate novels, co-written with Caroline Stevermer; the Mairelon books, which take place in Regency England; and the Old-West Frontier Magic series. Her latest book is The Dark Lord’s Daughter. In 2009, Wrede donated her archive to the department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University

Source for image: Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pat_Wrede-ddb_20040306_010-022_(cropped).jpg

by Amanda Patterson

Please click here for our Literary Birthday Calendar