"Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness"
About this Quote
DiCamillo’s image of reading as illumination and writing as wilderness navigation lands because it’s both generous and quietly corrective. “Every well-written book is a light for me” sidesteps the macho myth of the solitary genius. She’s not posturing as the author who invents worlds from nothing; she’s admitting dependency as craft, not weakness. The phrase “for me” matters: this isn’t a universal commandment about literature’s moral power. It’s a working writer’s confession that books function like streetlights - practical, steady, and most valuable when you’re trying not to get lost.
The second sentence sharpens the point into process. “When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness” reframes influence as orientation rather than imitation. Wilderness implies risk: the page is not a blank canvas so much as an unpredictable terrain where confidence can die quickly. Guides aren’t there to take the journey for you; they’re there to keep you moving, to model how to survive the dark stretches and still make something coherent.
Contextually, coming from a celebrated children’s author, the metaphor also pushes back against how children’s literature is sometimes treated as “simple.” DiCamillo signals an apprenticeship lineage: she’s part of a tradition, learning from structure, voice, pacing, and emotional honesty in others’ work. The subtext is an ethics of reading: if you want to write well, you don’t just consume books for plot. You study them the way you’d study a map - not to copy the route, but to understand what makes arrival possible.
The second sentence sharpens the point into process. “When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness” reframes influence as orientation rather than imitation. Wilderness implies risk: the page is not a blank canvas so much as an unpredictable terrain where confidence can die quickly. Guides aren’t there to take the journey for you; they’re there to keep you moving, to model how to survive the dark stretches and still make something coherent.
Contextually, coming from a celebrated children’s author, the metaphor also pushes back against how children’s literature is sometimes treated as “simple.” DiCamillo signals an apprenticeship lineage: she’s part of a tradition, learning from structure, voice, pacing, and emotional honesty in others’ work. The subtext is an ethics of reading: if you want to write well, you don’t just consume books for plot. You study them the way you’d study a map - not to copy the route, but to understand what makes arrival possible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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