What advice for kids do you have that want to be writers?

For kids who want to be writers, I have a couple pieces of advice and some of them are going to seem really really obvious, but I’m going to say them anyway.

The first thing is to read. Read everything, read the stuff you love and the stuff you don’t think you’re going to like to read in your genre, whether it be the fantasy, science fiction or realistic fiction you love, but also to read outside your genre. To read everything and every different kind of genre, and especially to read non-fiction because each different genre it has different tricks, it has different techniques, it has different things you can pick up from it and you can use those things in your own writing.

Then the other thing is to write. You have to write a lot before you really figure out what works and what doesn’t.

The third thing, which I know doesn't work for everybody, but I think having a critique partner is absolutely the thing that made me ever finish a book. Having somebody to tell me "this is line is bad, this makes no sense, you didn't explain why we're here and this isn’t working." And also having somebody tell me "this is good, keep going" because there’s a really long you are laboring writing before anyone will ever see what you are doing except your critique partner.

So I think, for me, that was the thing that really pushed me to keep writing when I wanted to slow down or I got frustrated or I became sure that I would never finish.