Considerată un fel de Hans Christian Andersen al Americii (cărţi precum “Owl Moon”, “How do Dinosaurus Say Goodnight”) Jane Yolen este o scriitoare prolifică şi înţeleaptă……mi-au plăcut gândurile ei …iată un scurt fragment de pe site-ul ei (www.janeyolen.com)…aş vrea să fie traduse cărţile ei!!!

Random thoughts on writing and on children’s books:

Be Prepared for Serendipity:

Be prepared as you write to be surprised by your own writing, surprised by what you find out about yourself and about your world. Be ready for the happy accident. Open yourself to the numinous, to the shapes and shades of language, to that first powerful thrust of story, to the character that develops away from you (sort of like a wayward adolescent), to the surprise of the exact and perfect ending.

You are–after all–the very first reader of what you write. Please that reader. You may not have any other!

Children and Stories:

Children know themselves to be the single most powerless unit in today’s world. They can not support themselves, they cannot vote, they have little physical strength, they have but a small knowledge of the universe. They cannot see over walls. As infants they are entirely dependent upon the kindness of adults, and as they grow up further, they are still small satellites in an adult world. They dream of being big enough and old enough and able enough to tame the Wild Things In reality those Wild Things could well devour them.

Therefore we give them many tools with which to keep the the real world at bay until they are ready for it. We give them teachers, we give them toys, we give them chants and prayers and cultural attitudes, and surround them with tribes and tribal constraints.

We give them stories.

A writer has many successes:

Each new word captured.

Each completed sentence.

Each rounded paragraph leading into the next.

Each idea that sustains and then develops.

Each character who, like a wayward adolescent, leaves home and finds a life.

Each new metaphor that, like the exact error it is, some how works.

Each new book that ends–and so begins.

Selling the piece is only an exclamation point, a spot of punctuation.