"Again and again, I have approached something--a beast or a bear--and I have sent it off in a different direction," she said.
Lowry also discussed the emotions children's writers invest in their characters.
"We who write tend to fall in love with our characters, but because we love them we want them to get through safely...triumphant," she said.
Lowry, who was born in 1937, said that books she read as a child still influence her work today.
She said reading Marjorie K. Rawlings' The Yearling with her mother as a child made her "aware of the power of books to affect the human soul."
She also said that such early tragedies as her older sister's death from cancer and the murder of her childhood best friend later served as inspirations for her early works.
Lowry began her first children's book, based on her memories of her sister's death, in 1976 upon the request of a Houghton Mifflin editor who had seen one of her short stories in a magazine.
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