Words matter. These are the best Cecily von Ziegesar Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
My biggest fear in writing ‘Gossip Girl’ was that the characters would sound like stereotypical rich, air-headed heiresses. These were my friends. They were smart and multifaceted. They had interests and passions. They wanted to become lawyers and doctors and writers and filmmakers.
‘Gossip Girl’ came out in rapid succession over two years, so the endings always had to be suspenseful so that you couldn’t wait for the next one.
I decided that, if I were to write a teen series, I’d want to set it in a place that was familiar to me – Manhattan, where I’d grown up – and I’d model the characters on myself and my friends.
I avoid the young adult section altogether if possible, although it’s sometimes fun to catch a girl lying on the floor, reading ‘Gossip Girl.’
I feel like ‘Gossip Girl’ isn’t really ‘Gossip Girl’ anymore when they’re away at school because they don’t go to NYU; they go to, like, Yale and Brown. New York City is just as much a character as anyone else in the books, and I was really sort of reluctant to show them off in their separate college worlds.
I’d never really babysat. I feel like I’m Blair, or ‘Gossip Girl.’ A teenager, basically – and now suddenly I’m a mom?
I went to Colby College in Waterville, ME and did picture it when I was writing ‘Cum Laude.’ So many of the physical details were included, like the loop where people jogged. The story of the chapel is also borrowed from Colby… but the students and cast of characters are fictional.
When I meet other parents and they’re more ‘mumsy’ than I am – you know, I don’t want to be ‘mumsy,’ but I’m like, ‘Were you always like that or… what happened?’
Back in my days as a children’s book editor, my superiors caught on to the fact that teenagers were using the Internet to gossip about each other, and thought it might be nifty to develop a series of books about an anonymous high-school blogger who gossips about her classmates. The concept was passed on to me.
I’m always saying that my books are not autobiographical because they’re not. I can’t choose any one scene and say, ‘Oh, this is exactly what happened to me!’ I just use little snippets of things as a starting point!
But I’ve always been fascinated with that prettiest-girl-in-the-class person that I never was, getting inside her head and showing that she’s just as tormented and messed up as everybody else.
I remember, in my senior year, one of my teachers taking me aside and saying: ‘You look really tired.’ This was when I was being a bad kid and she knew that something was wrong.
Even now, I change my style and clothes from one day to the next, but during high school I blended in. I think a lot of people are that way. I guess that’s why I can write about an array of characters.
I guess I was popular in high school.
The girls show more skin these days, but I think, generally, they behave the same way as when I was growing up.
