Robin Wasserman Quotes

I used to be an obsessive outliner – figuring that writing without an outline was like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute on the way down.

– Robin Wasserman

I try not to think too much about an audience when I’m writing the first draft of a book – at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what I’ve written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.

– Robin Wasserman

‘The Waking Dark’ is about what happens when something awakens a town’s darkest impulses and unleashes them on the world.

– Robin Wasserman

Of course Stephen King doesn’t believe in teen novels. I’ve started to suspect he doesn’t even believe in teenagers.

– Robin Wasserman

I’m not one of those authors who claims to hear voices in my head or ‘let the characters speak through me,’ whatever that might mean.

– Robin Wasserman

Teen fiction should be about teenagers – no matter how many arguments there are about what YA lit should be, this seems like the one thing we can all agree on.

– Robin Wasserman

Instead of inventing imaginary friends, I invented whole imaginary worlds. They were elaborate scenarios about spies and adventurers and top secret missions. I crawled along my swing set, searching for escape routes from my maximum-security prison; I biked through the neighborhood, the wind in my hair and a fleet of evildoers on my heels.

– Robin Wasserman

For me, the teen years were all about searching for a place for myself, wondering why I seemed so different than everyone else, wondering especially why no one could look past the surface and figure out who I really was underneath.

– Robin Wasserman

As someone who writes and teaches YA fiction, I spend a lot of time trying to define its character and readership, and I don’t think I’m alone – genres are all about boundary drawing, and the YA genre is, in a lot of ways, about carving out boundaries around adolescence, a space for teenagers to do teenage things.

– Robin Wasserman