Sara Zarr
I wouldn't say I'm stuck in my adolescence, but I think, like a lot of people, I carry my teen years with me. I feel really in touch with those feelings, and how intense and complicated life seems in those years.Collection: Teen
We write in ways that, we generally hope, reflect real life, or at least look familiar to humans. And in life, recurring themes are a recurring theme. We never quite conquer a pet vice or a relationship pattern or a communication habit. We're haunted by our particular demons.Collection: Pet
When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.Collection: Sympathy
Making lists of favorite things is, for me, a task ridden with anxiety. What if I've accidentally excluded something I love? What if I discover something new tomorrow that I love even more?
It's hard to say when my interest in writing began, or how. My mother read to my sister and me every night, and we always loved playing make-believe games. I had a well-primed imagination. I didn't start thinking about writing as a serious pursuit, a career I could have, until after college.
I was a 'learn by doing' writer - I never took any formal writing classes. So it took a long time to figure things out and find my voice.
I didn't 'decide' to write YA, per se. But every time I thought of a story, it featured characters 15, 16, 17.
There were about ten years of trying, failing, trying again, suffering rejection, etc. My first published book, 'Story of a Girl', was the fourth book I wrote.
I have no desire to go back to San Francisco.
I'm not really a plot writer - I'm more interested in the characters and sort of small events that propel the story forward.
Everyone has an identity crisis when they are 16 or 17 years old.
I wanted to be free to write the way I wanted to write, and my impression of Christian publishing, at least in fiction, was that there wasn't room for what I wanted to write.
One of my favorite authors is Robert Cormier. He was a devout Catholic and a very nice man, which might not be the impression you get from reading his books.
I'm always in a place that is sincere but conflicted about different things that come with being a Christian and being an active, churchgoing Christian.
Family or love or romance, whatever it is, is not restricted to perfect people. If it were, it wouldn't exist. All of that comes out in my work in some way.
My parents met in music school and my father was a music professor and conductor. Growing up, we always had classical and contemporary music playing. There was a lot of Mozart and the Beatles.
I don't like to do too much psychological research because it might turn a character into a patchwork.
I remember being in high school and listening to Vivaldi's 'Winter' and being so overwhelmed with emotion.
My books usually end where they began. I try to bring characters back to a point that is familiar but different because of the growth that they have gone through.
My books have been translated into various languages and sold in other countries, but I never have any contact with the foreign publishers and am so disconnected from that process that it seems almost imaginary. With 'How to Save a Life', I worked closely with Usborne editors and have been involved in the publicity.
I do have a little bit more confidence in - or at least familiarity with - my process. For example, when it feels like it's going badly or that I'm lost, I know I'll eventually find my way because I've been through it before. But writing itself is still hard.
The one reader I'm trying to please as I write is me, and I'm pretty difficult to please.
I'm so focused on trying to craft the story that I'm in my own little world with it and that process. The one reader I'm trying to please as I write is me, and I'm pretty difficult to please.
The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.
When a young reader tells you that they'd never finished a book outside of school until they read yours, or that they really needed to hear something that one of your characters says or thinks... that's just rewarding and humbling.
My parents met in music school, and my father was a music professor and conductor. Growing up, we always had classical and contemporary music playing.
I played the clarinet, and my sister played the violin... If we'd had the discipline and the passion, maybe we could have been good.
My first published book, 'Story of a Girl', was the fourth book I wrote.
I don't want to pretend like I'm some intellectual person who understands Flannery O'Connor.
When my characters are questioning things, it's not me leading up to an answer; it's me asking those same questions and letting the characters' lives unfold and seeing where it takes them.
I grew up in San Francisco in the 1970s. We were part of a church that belonged to the California Jesus movement.
I always felt that church is where I'm going to find my community and people to live my life with.
I tend to describe recurring themes as being part of a writer's DNA - something so deeply embedded in us that even we don't notice it until we've written three or four books.
Is it good, bad, or neutral to recognize thematic patterns in your own work? When it comes to recurring themes, I'm of the mind that knowledge is probably not power, at least in terms of the work.
Readers want a story, not a pattern. It's the specifics of a story that make it really ping our various reader radars.
My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.
. . .There are certain people who come into your life, and leave a mark. . . Their place in your heart is tender; a bruise of longing, a pulse of unfinished business. Just hearing their names pushes and pulls at you in a hundred ways, and when you try to define those hundred ways, describe them even to yourself, words are useless.Collection: Life
Forgetting isn't enough. You can paddle away from the memories and think they are gone. But they will keep floating back, again and again and agian. They circle you, like sharks. Until, unless, something, someone? Can do more than just cover the wound.Collection: Memories
That's how you know you really trust someone, I think; when you don't have to talk all the time to make sure they still like you or prove that you have interesting stuff to say.Collection: Thinking
The kind of life I want is to be a person who would get a personal note every day.Collection: Want
You were never what I wanted to forget.Collection: Forget
don’t mistake a new place for a new you.Collection: Mistake
That's how life feels to me. Everyone is doing it; everyone knows how. To live and be who they are and find a place, find a moment. I'm still waiting.Collection: Waiting
I had them all fooled into believing I was normal and well-adjusted, a rock of sensibility who could always be counted on to have a positive attitude.Collection: Attitude
Life was mostly made up of things you couldn’t control, full of surprises, and they weren’t always good. Life wasn’t what you made it. You were what life made you.Collection: Good Life
And he left. I watched him walk out – he didn’t say good-bye, he didn’t even look back. It scared me, how easy it was for him to do that.Collection: Bye
What brings two people together anyway?Collection: Two
I wonder how you're supposed to know the exact moment when there's no more hope.Collection: Wonder
No one measures a life in weeks and days. You measure life in years and by the things that happen to you.Collection: Years
A know a place called New Beginnings, but I don't think it works quite like that. You can't just erase everything that came before.Collection: New Beginnings