I need to sort of recalibrate my soul I read Diana Wynne Jones, because she’s so wonderful and because I like her unruly haphazard magic that she uses. It almost feels like the weeds that spring up between the nice carefully laid out lines of the sidewalk, you know, and it’s just, it’s the stuff of life that takes over when we’re trying to like put order and rules on things. I love her books.
Another thing I do a lot is I read a lot of fairy tales. I read them constantly. And again it’s that kind of baffling storytelling and the immediacy of a fairy tale is so cool to me. But I also read everything. I love reading non-fiction. I just finished, actually I just reread the The Soul of an Octopus, which is such a good book. I love reading stuff like that. And I read a ton of poetry. And also if I need to recalibrate my soul I also go back to Louise Erdrich’s book, Last Report of Miracles at Little No Horse, because it’s wonderful.
One of the things, another thing that I tell kids when I teach writing is I tell them that week we’re going to write the way that real writers write, which is to say selfishly. And I tell them that this is like the big secret that writers don’t tell people that we are writing to entertain ourselves. We are writing to make ourselves question and wonder and feel things.
We are writing to make our own hearts beat a lot and we are writing to make our own, we write to make ourselves laugh and we write to make ourselves cry. When I was writing The Witches Way I was in a coffee shop and got to one particular scene and started sobbing inconsolably. And I wasn’t expecting to, but we write to elicit great emotions in ourselves.
And so I tell kids, you know, you are writing for yourself, you’re going to write to delight yourself. You’re going to write the stories that move you.