From Rebecca Stead's Newbery Acceptance Speech
The people in books told me things that the real people in my life either wouldn't admit or didn't realize I needed to know in the first place. And the more I read, the more I thought about writing my own stories, with my own kinds of truth in them. By the time I was nine, I knew I wanted to write. But I didn't tell anyone, because it was too wild a dream. Instead, I told people I wanted to be an actress, which I thought was much more practical, and I waited. I waited about twenty years. Meanwhile, like a lot of people who secretly want to write, I became a lawyer.
Then one day it dawned on me that it's difficult to become a writer without ever writing anything. So I began to write short stories, and I worked on those stories for years until the universe intervened by telling my three-year-old son to push my laptop off the dining room table. No more stories. And suddenly the whole secret writing dream felt very worn out. I asked myself why I had ever wanted to write in the first place.
And then I remembered that door, and what I had found on the other side of it, and I began writing again. But this time, I was writing for children.
...I was halfway through the first draft of the book when I became afraid of it. There came a moment of doubt: was I really going to pour all of my inner weirdness into this book? Was I losing my story, or finding it? I wasn't sure. By the time my fortieth birthday rolled around in January 2008, I had stopped writing the book.
A week later, I went to a writers' conference where Laurie Halse Anderson spoke about craft. Her talk was called: "Plot vs. Character: Cage Match Smackdown."
It was a great talk, and at the end of it, Laurie spoke about fear. She told us that sometimes you just have to stop thinking and write.
"Don't think. Write." I drank these words down like an antidote... I walked out of the meeting room, opened my computer, and created a new folder, called "don't think." In that folder, I began writing my book again, and this time I managed to get to the end without worrying too much about exactly what kind of a book it was...
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Then one day it dawned on me that it's difficult to become a writer without ever writing anything. So I began to write short stories, and I worked on those stories for years until the universe intervened by telling my three-year-old son to push my laptop off the dining room table. No more stories. And suddenly the whole secret writing dream felt very worn out. I asked myself why I had ever wanted to write in the first place.
And then I remembered that door, and what I had found on the other side of it, and I began writing again. But this time, I was writing for children.
...I was halfway through the first draft of the book when I became afraid of it. There came a moment of doubt: was I really going to pour all of my inner weirdness into this book? Was I losing my story, or finding it? I wasn't sure. By the time my fortieth birthday rolled around in January 2008, I had stopped writing the book.
A week later, I went to a writers' conference where Laurie Halse Anderson spoke about craft. Her talk was called: "Plot vs. Character: Cage Match Smackdown."
It was a great talk, and at the end of it, Laurie spoke about fear. She told us that sometimes you just have to stop thinking and write.
"Don't think. Write." I drank these words down like an antidote... I walked out of the meeting room, opened my computer, and created a new folder, called "don't think." In that folder, I began writing my book again, and this time I managed to get to the end without worrying too much about exactly what kind of a book it was...
Source