bestselling author Judy Blume who talks about her hiatus from writing and why she returned to it.
A few years ago, the author discovered her writing had taken a back burner. She was spending too much time editing scripts for movie deals that never seemed to go anywhere. "I finally just said, 'I can't stand it anymore! I want to go back in a little room -- because wherever I am, I work in a little room -- and write something that I know will happen.'" So she wrote. Double Fudge, her first book in four years and the last in the Fudge series, came out in 2002. Dream two -- get back into that little room.
"I never stop writing," she said, looking out at the boats blowing about in the pond on an uncharacteristically cool and windy August day. "If something comes, I just write it and put it away. It gives me a sense of security." One day a story came to her about losing a tooth. She raced to her laptop and started writing. As she did, she realized the characters were the same ones that had starred in her 1984 picture book, The Pain and the Great One. "My daughter was the Great One," she said. She had written the original story on a day long before the book was published, when the rain had trapped her two children, six and eight, inside. "She called him [her brother] The Pain," she said, speaking of her daughter who is now in her 40s, "and said, 'I am the Great One, the older sister.'"
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