A Quote by Michael Foreman
When I started writing and illustrating, I knew little of classic children's literature. My stories came from real life, from my concerns about what was happening in the world.
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But when I was a little kid, I was always writing stories and illustrating little books that I would create.
Before I began concentrating on writing, in my free time I was an artist, making and selling etchings illustrating stories based on my readings in classical literature.
I've heard people ask, What's so sacred about a classic books that you can't change it for the modern child? Nothing is sacred about a classic. What makes a classic is the life that has accrued to it from generation after generation of children. Children give life to these books. Some books which you could hardly bear to read are, for children, classic.
I believe that if a child has a feel for writing and wants to write, there is an audience. Children should just dive in and go at it. I would encourage children to write about themselves and things that are happening to them. It is a lot easier and they know the subject better if they use something out of their everyday lives as an inspiration. Read stories, listen to stories, to develop an understanding of what stories are all about.
I think acting came later in life when I went to college. I started out there. I wasn't a big star in the school plays or anything. I guess I just really liked stories. I was an English-literature major, and that's all about stories and narratives. Film and theater are very powerful storytelling mediums. You sit in a dark room and enter another world. I love that as a member of the audience, and I sort of wanted to get on the other side.
Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.
I'm always loath to make generalizations about what is for children and what isn't. Certainly children's literature as a genre has some restrictions, so certain things will never pop up in a Snicket book. But I didn't know anything about writing for children when I started - this is the theme of naïveté creeping up on us once more - and I sort of still don't, and I'm happy that adults are reading them as well as children.
India went through a dramatic revolution after the '90s when our economy started opening up for the first time and Indians were now experiencing the Western life, if you will. Drugs and sex and a lot of those influences came in as the economy stabilized, and we were growing up and experiencing that. The Indian writing market was very small at that time. Our literature was very attuned to what Western audiences were interested in, so everybody was writing about the slums in India and magic realism or stories about Hindus and Muslims and partition.
It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.
But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.
I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.
I came to music and knowing a little bit about life, and I came to music knowing a lot about business - and that's a real advantage. By the time I came to music, I had purchased real estate, opened restaurants, and been in the business world, so the music business didn't blindside me.
Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics.
I'm kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother's a children's librarian, and all of the children's literature I read was from her childhood - E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn't children's literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world.
I am a bit of a head-in-the-sand person as concerns things happening beyond the walls of my study. And I don't feel particularly guilty about that. I figure that my primary job is producing the very best stories I am capable of writing, and that is what I concentrate upon doing. That is within my control.
I would like to be known for honest, relatable writing and stories that that are real. There's just this shift I think is happening in a lot of society right now where being your most real self, however embarrassing or vulnerable or weird that is, is the coolest. I feel like that's what Lena Dunham's about and Amy Schumer's about.
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