I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.
— Jacqueline Woodson
When I'm feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it's going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn't historically been represented in literature.
I couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.
Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.
You can't have too many books featuring people of color, just like you can't have too many books featuring white people.
The epistolary form is one of the hardest to write. It's so hard to show something that's bigger in a letter. Plus, you have to have the balance of how many letters are going to work to tell the story and how few are going to make it fall apart.
To me, elegy suggests that there is hope, and in some respects you've moved past the loss and are able to deal with it and to write about it.
I'm usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back.
The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.
I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.
