Literary Birthday – 3 February – Ransom Riggs

Happy Birthday, Ransom Riggs, born 3 February 1980.

Ransom Riggs Quotes

1. If you must fail … fail spectacularly!
2. I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.
3. When someone won’t let you in, eventually you stop knocking.
4. Laughing doesn’t make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better.
5. One thing that’s drilled into you when you’re writing screenplays is to always keep the story moving at a healthy clip, which I tried to do in Miss Peregrine. Also, I think my writing style is fairly atmospheric and ‘visual’, if you can describe a book that way, because I find that I have trouble writing a scene unless I’ve imagined its setting completely, so that I’m describing a mental picture I’ve created in my own head.
6. We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing them becomes too high.
7. The easiest kind of lying is when you leave things out of a story rather than make them up.
8. Whenever I try to map things out they inevitably change. Which doesn’t mean I don’t map them out — I just try to embrace the better ideas that come along as my fingers are flying around the keyboard mid-draft!
9. What an unchallenging life it would be if we always got things right on the first go.

Ransom Riggs is an American writer and filmmaker. He is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children novels, starting with Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. He is married to author, Tahereh Mafi. Follow him on Instagram and Facebook and visit his website.

Source for image: Thesupermat, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Montreuil_-_Salon_du_livre_jeunesse_2012_-_Ransom_Riggs_-_002.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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