“If you aren't having fun, if
you aren't anxious to find out what happens next as you write, then not only
will you run out of steam on the story, but you won't be able to entertain
anyone else, either.” – Tamora Pierce
Pierce,
who was born on this date in 1954, is winner of the Margaret A. Edwards Award
from the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) of the American
Library Association for her two quartets – Song of the Lioness and Protector
of the Small. The annual award recognizes one writer and a particular body
of work for "significant and lasting contribution to young adult
literature."
A
reader from a very young age, Pierce started writing in 6th grade
and gravitated to science fiction after being introduced to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The
Lord of the Rings. Known best for stories
featuring young heroines, her “Lioness” series is about a girl named
Alanna striving to become a knight during Arthurian times. Fantasy novels and Arthurian legend was the
basis for the worlds she thought up as a girl, she said. After her initial success, she added
contemporary issues like youth crime, or things like cholera outbreaks in
Africa to her writing. Pierce said she
decided to write her stories about strong young female characters because she noticed
a lack of them in the books she read when she was a girl.
“(Usually) I don't write from dreams
because I don't remember mine, but I had a fragment of an image left about
twins whose father was telling them how their lives were going to go for the
next eight years,” she recalled about the genesis for one of her recent books. “I wrote a scene about that, and then another,
and then another, and then another, and after five months I had 732 pages.”
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