Judy Blume
Judy Blume
Judy Blumeis an American writer known for children's and young adultfiction. Some of her best known works are Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Deenie, and Blubber. The New Yorker has called her books "talismans that, for a significant segment of the American female population, marked the passage from childhood to adolescence."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth12 February 1938
CityElizabeth, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
I was sick all the time, one exotic illness after another, which lasted throughout my twenties. My worst decade. But from the day the first book was accepted, I never got sick again. Writing changed my life.
I always had stories inside my head and one day I just decided to start writing them down. I didn't actually decide.
I think people who write for kids, we have that ability to go back into our own lives.
I use a computer, but before I begin each new book I keep a notebook. I write down everything that comes to mind during that period before I actually begin. It might take months or weeks. That notebook is my security blanket so that I never have to face a blank screen (or blank page). But I print out often and my best ideas usually come with a pencil in my hand.
When you ask, Did writing change my life? It totally changed my life. It gave me my life.
Nothing teaches you as much about writing dialogue as listening to it.
I love to talk with children. I try to visit schools but it's hard for me to travel when I'm trying to write. Some authors are able to do both.
The child from nine to 12 interests me very much. And so, those were the years that I like to write about, when I'm writing.
The only thing that works with writing is that you care so passionately about it yourself, that you make someone else care passionately about it.
I never thought about writing. I was married young, I was still in college, as we did then, and I had two babies before I was 25, and I loved them, and I loved taking care of them, but I was a little bit cuckoo, staying at home and not having a creative outlet.
When I started to write, it was the '70s, and throughout that decade, we didn't have any problems with book challenges or censorship.
What I remember when I started to write was how I couldn't wait to get up in the morning to get to my characters.
I wanted to write honest books for kids because I didn't have those when I was a kid.
I like to read fiction best and I like to write fiction, too.