Jenny Han Quotes
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A tweet in an article can feel more permanent and louder than a tweet on Twitter.
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I think that's what distinguishes YA from adult fiction - it's not just the age of the characters, but it's the sense of hope. Because I don't think I've ever read a YA book that feels completely hopeless at the end.
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I don't think kids of color should have to search far and wide to find books that reflect their experience.
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Writing is just always hard for me. It always feels like drawing blood. It's never particularly easy.
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My name is Jennifer, and when I first went to school, my kindergarten teacher called me Jenny, and from then on, I was Jenny.
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I was writing my first book when I was in college. I was a teenager.
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There's some of me in all my characters.
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I write diverse books because the world we live in is diverse, and I want my books to reflect that truth.
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My sister is my very favorite person, and I dedicated 'To All the Boys I've Loved Before' to her.
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I don't plan anything out, and I don't write in chronological order. The emotional tenor is what guides me, but a lot of it is feeling my way through the dark. That's okay if you have unlimited time to work and stumble upon things in a delightful way, but under a deadline, it can be really stressful.
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I started writing my first book for young people when I was in college. I was only a couple of years out of my teens when I began; I felt closer to that experience than I did as an adult. But I've always been drawn to stories about young people.
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All my writer friends outline their books, and I find that hard. It doesn't feel inspired to me. I get bored with that, and really, I just want it to be fun.
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It's fairly common to get something optioned but really rare to actually see it become a movie.
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I like to read non-fiction on my e-reader, but as for fiction, I usually like to have a copy to keep at home.
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I came of age during the Golden Age of rom coms - like the '90s and 2000s - there were so many.
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I try to be measured and thoughtful about what I put out there because I know a lot of young people follow me on Twitter, and I take that seriously - which is why I don't exclusively tweet about cookies and 'Game of Thrones' and YA.
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When you write something by hand, there's a sort of intimacy that is just intrinsic to that act. You don't get to delete something in the same way, where it's like it was never there.
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When I finished 'P.S. I Still Love You,' I truly was done with the series. I kept saying the books were two halves of a heart. But I suppose time and space had made me nostalgic, because my mind kept drifting back to Lara Jean and Peter, wondering what they were up to.
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When you're young, you don't have a lot of control over even basic things in your life - where you live, what you eat, where you go during the day, how you get there. You don't have a lot of control, and that can feel sort of unstable in its own way because you don't get a say in those basic things.
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Sometimes you don't know what a book is about until you are finished with it and you're talking about it.
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The feedback for 'P.S. I Still Love You' has been pretty amazing. To have written this story about this family with Asian-American characters and be so embraced is really incredible for me as a writer as well as a person of color.
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Just like Lara Jean in my book 'To All the Boys I've Loved Before,' I used to write letters to boys I was in love with - letters full of emotion and longing and also recrimination - but they were for my eyes only.
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With Asian-Americans actors, specifically, there's been fewer opportunities for them in TV and film and fewer that have the ability to actually make a career out of it. It becomes a bit of a chicken and egg situation, where they're like, 'Oh, but they're not famous names,' but they haven't had a chance to be in anything yet, either.
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I always think about race as a part of one's identity, not the whole of one's identity. You don't want it to be the defining characteristic of a character. There has to be more.