A Quote by Shannon Hale

I cannot write to anyone outside myself--if I tried, it would be a horrible story, flat and lifeless. I write to myself. That's the only person I'm trying to please. — © Shannon Hale
I cannot write to anyone outside myself--if I tried, it would be a horrible story, flat and lifeless. I write to myself. That's the only person I'm trying to please.
When I lock myself up to write, I cannot allow myself to think about the censor or the reviewer or anyone but my characters and their story!
When I am at peace with myself . . . then thoughts flow into me most easily and at their best. Where they come from and how - that I cannot say . . . I'd be willing to work forever and forever if I were permitted to write only such music as I want to write and can write - which I myself think good.
I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like "fidelity" and "adultery", by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that I had him I'd be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.
There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work.
I do not really write for children: I write only for me and for the few people I hope to please, and I write for the story.
I don't have any outside view of myself, and if I did, I would probably be creatively inhibited. I just write in the way that I write.
Many of the traits in my characters are exaggerations of things I see in myself. But in 'How Should a Person Be?' I wasn't trying to write about myself so much as a combination of myself and these women I was seeing in our culture.
When I have a lot of emotion going on, I'll write. I write letters to my family, my boyfriend, anyone I'm trying to get my point across to. It's easier for me to express myself.
I can't write anything for myself. I can write when I hear like [John] Coltrane play something; I used to write chords and stuff for him to play in one bar. I can write for other people, but I don't never write for myself.
After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.
I'm finding things out about myself as a person - as a writer - as I write, and so are the people who listen to what I do. But they have this additional aspect of how they take the stuff that I do, and so it broadens the work and it creates this strange connection. It's really a way of strangers communicating through this third thing, which is a body of work. But really, I know it's a cliché to say I write for myself, but I write for myself.
I'm not trying to say I'm this artist who is all artsy and that I only write music for myself, because I don't. I write music for other people to enjoy, so I think about if it'd be an idea someone else would like.
I write to please myself—of course, that is a given. But beyond this reach for pleasure, I know that I write for my countrymen, that they may be lifted from apathy and ignorance. I write because of a compulsion to make something out of the nothing that is my own life.
I do know that I need solitude, not only to write but to nourish myself (being, like most writers, an introvert) so that I do keep trying to write.
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.
I write 100% of my material by myself. That's really important to me because I don't want what I'm trying to say to be diluted by anyone that might not know my circumstance or who I am as a person.
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