Try not to become disappointed if someone doesn't like a story you've written. Stick up for your ideas, but listen to what other people say, too. They might have good advice.
Margaret MahyRead
Of course there are big differences in length and character and vocabulary, but each level has its particular pleasures when it comes to the words one can use and the way one uses them.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the unique joys and pleasures found in different types of writing, regardless of their complexity or style.
Margaret Mahy suggests that while various forms of writing differ in length, character, and vocabulary, each has its own distinct pleasures. This could imply that writers can find satisfaction in the diverse ways they can express themselves and that the richness of language provides unique experiences at every level of writing, from simple to complex.
Themes
WritingLanguagePleasureExpressionVocabulary
In practice
Example use cases
During a writing workshop, one might use this quote to encourage participants to explore various writing styles.
More from Margaret Mahy
All quotes →Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.
Margaret MahyRead
By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else's life.
Margaret MahyRead
When you are reading, someone has done a lot of work on your behalf, someone has had ideas and has then written and corrected and improved them so that they can be shared.
Margaret MahyRead
Perhaps every time anyone is praised it means that someone else somewhere is going to be ignored
Margaret MahyRead
It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.
Margaret MahyRead
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