Author of the MonthPatricia MacLachlan

Birthday: March 3, 1938

MacLachlan Musings

“You’d like to have your books last decades.

You’d like to have them last and be around and

be timely, so you can pick them up in the year

2080 and still like them. That’s what you hope

for.”

“I write quiet books; they are not sis-boom-bah.

I look at the sis-boom-bah books wishing that I

could write them; but when I sit down to write

them, they don’t come out as me.”

“I love my delete button. I’m actually going to

put a sticker with flowers on it because I use it

so much.”

“You know, we just pass things down. I hear my

mother in myself. I hear my father. Sometimes, I

hear them in my kids. It’s interesting how those

ties just come down whether you like it or not.”

Find Patricia’s picture

books in the Easy

section.

Find her chapter books

in the

Fiction section.

E

MAC

F

MAC

My advice to children who want to be

writers is to read, read, read! That is

the very best way to find out what

kinds of stories they love and how

they might want to write themselves.

Why do you write?

Each time I write a new piece, whether a novel, a

picture book, a speech or anything really, it has

so much to do with what I’m going through

personally or a problem I’m trying to work out.

When I began writing I knew two things already. I

knew it would be hard work. And I knew it would

often take a long time to get a story done.

What I DIDN’T know then that I know now is that

writers don’t get a story right the first time. We

write and rewrite over and over again. I write

chapter 1 of a story three or four times before I go

on to chapter 2. That takes a long time. Writers

have to be very patient.

Quotes from

• http://www.mackin.com/LIBRARY/AUTHOR-INTERVIEWS-MACLACHLAN.aspx

• https://twowritingteachers.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/qa-wmaclachlan/

• http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/43625-q-a-with-patricia-

maclachlan.html