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!
Judy BlumeRead
When I'm writing, I'm never trying to teach anything - maybe I'm trying to illuminate.
Interpretation
The quote highlights that the purpose of writing is not to instruct but to shed light on ideas and experiences.
Judy Blume expresses that her intention as a writer is not to impart lessons or explicitly teach her readers; rather, she aims to illuminate thoughts and feelings, inviting readers to explore and understand themselves and the world more deeply. This perspective emphasizes the role of writing as a form of exploration and connection rather than straightforward education.
In practice
A teacher might share this quote during a writing workshop to inspire students.
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!
What I remember when I started to write was how I couldn't wait to get up in the morning to get to my characters.
What can happen if a young reader picks up a book he/she isn't yet ready for? Questions, maybe. Usually, that child puts down the book and says, 'Boring.' Or, 'I'm not ready for this.' Kids are really good at knowing what they can handle.
Concentrate on how good if feels to be alive. No matter what. Just to see the color of the sky, just to smell the air, and feel the wind in your face
I wrote 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret' right out of my own experiences and my own feelings when I was in sixth grade.
Nobody ever asks me why my characters don't text each other. Besides, as soon as you put something 'electronic' in a book, it's already out of date by the time it's published: everything will have changed. Human emotion, on the other hand, will never change.
You will also find that help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.
Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.
With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.
In the long run, your human capital is your main base of competition. Your leading indicator of where you're going to be 20 years from now is how well you're doing in your education system.
Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.
Public intellectuals are often put in the position of having their words, no matter how off-the-cuff, treated as doctrine.
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