One professor in college told me flat out I wasn’t good enough to enter the creative writing program. I saved that letter and promised myself I would send it back to her when my first book came out. Ellen Potter Read Quote
I write about two hours a day, and I write in fits and spurts – 45 minutes here, a half-hour there – and when I get stuck, which happens often, I take the dogs for a walk. But during the time when I’m not actually writing, I’m thinking. Ellen Potter Read Quote
Books are such quiet things – created in silence, read in silence – yet publishing a book has become a very noisy business. I’ve been noisy, too. I felt like I had to be in order to connect with my readers. Ellen Potter Read Quote
I had a blog where I tried to be transparent while giving away nothing. I tweeted and Facebooked badly. As a writer, your ‘voice’ is your calling card, yet my voice was becoming indistinguishable from billions of other voices. Ellen Potter Read Quote
If E.B. White were writing in 2013, would there be a ‘Charlotte’s Web’ trailer and an @SomePig Twitter account? I doubt it. Yet, in a way, he’d be missing out because I’m beginning to think that some of this noise is worth making – and some of it is worth hearing, too. Ellen Potter Read Quote
I’ve reread ‘The Secret Garden’ every year as an adult. I have a battered copy on my bookshelf – it’s really quite a mess! The experience of reading the novel keeps deepening for me. Ellen Potter Read Quote
I resisted children’s writing for a long time. I saw myself as a writer of literary fiction. But I had so much more fun writing kids’ books. Ellen Potter Read Quote
A lot of times, when I go back to books I loved when I was young, I don’t quite understand what it was that I loved about them. Rereading ‘The Secret Garden,’ I felt a lot like Mary feels when she visits her garden. Ellen Potter Read Quote
I pretty much always knew I wanted to be a writer. I was writing goofy stories when I was 7 or 8. That was what I call ‘wishful-thinking writing.’ I grew up in the city and always wanted a horse, but there was no way I was getting a horse. So I wrote all these stories about kids who had horses. It’s still fun entering these other worlds. Ellen Potter Read Quote