If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn’t read them: You’re not the audience!
As a reader, I tend not to get too much from tales of unrelenting grimness.
I do have to earn a living, so I’m conscious of probable reactions from readers, but the most important one is still the awareness that if I’m not enjoying a story, the reader won’t either.
My parents were very supportive and always encouraged us. My father was a gentle, nice man. My mother was quite a colorful character and a keen reader who encouraged me to write.
My influence is probably more from American crime writers than any Europeans. And I hardly read any Scandinavian crime before I started writing myself. I wasn’t a great crime reader to begin with.
I was bar mitzvahed, which was hard. I feel it was the hardest thing I ever had to do; harder than making a movie. It was a lot of studying, you know. I wasn’t a perfect Hebrew reader, and also, they say when you’re reading your Torah portion, you’re not supposed to memorize it. It turned out very tricky.
The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.
It’s important to begin a biography or any book or story with something to draw the reader in.
Too many writers of fiction don’t give the reader enough credit.
I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That’s the main reason I became a writer.
I think if a book has the power to move a reader, it also has the power to offend a reader. And you want your books to have power, so you just have to take what comes with that.
The newspaper fits the reader’s program while the listener must fit the broadcaster’s program.
I really love being a weirdo who writes a lot of different things for a lot of different ages. I have been considering doing a guide on my website so that a reader who liked one of my books could find the other books that he or she might like, because I know some of the books are really different from the rest.
I’ve had to work hard all my life, and I will never, ever ask a fan or reader to pay for something I’ve rushed. It’s not fair to them, and I will never give them anything except my absolute best.
Dear though the reader might be, I’d be silly to cater to what the reader wanted.
I enjoy a good cliffhanger. As a reader, I relish that nervous feeling you get when you’re engrossed in a story, but in the back of your mind you’re aware that there aren’t that many pages left. How will it end? Everything can’t be wrapped up! This can’t end! Then it does, and your heart seems to stop.
I don’t think the author should make the reader do that much work to remember who somebody is.
No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don’t confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.
I’m an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.
President Kennedy was a voracious reader and was forever coming up with fascinating bits of information.
For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that’s become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader’s ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.
I’m a painfully slow reader. And to this day, I mean, I love reading, and I’m very careful – very selective about what I read because I don’t read very fast and, therefore, not a great deal.
How many times have you opened a book, read the first few sentences and made a snap decision about whether to buy it? When it’s your book that’s coming under this casual-but-critical scrutiny, you want the reader to be instantly hooked. The way to accomplish this is to create compelling opening sentences.
The act of writing… is the act of trying to understand why my opinion is what it is. And ultimately, I think that’s the same experience the reader has when they pick up one of my books.
I’m a comic reader and a manga fan.
I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there’s always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.
Not to make him blush, but any story illustrated by Mike Mignola does things that prose alone can’t accomplish. The illustrations create mood and atmosphere, drawing the reader more deeply into the story than words could do on their own.
Sometimes a book is better than it ever had a right to be because of the history the reader brings to the reading and because of the methods educators use to bring a particular story alive.
Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they’re casting, they’re dressing the scene, they’re working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they’re also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
I’ve been a compulsive reader for as long as I can remember.
I’m not really a good reader. What I mean is, I think I’m not one of those people who can read a story and analyze it just like that.
I can fake decent penmanship, but generally, it’s really just terrible. And, unfortunately for me, maybe fortunately for the reader, it’s very often illegible. If I get an idea, and if I do remember to write it down, which is rare, I write in such a way that I can’t read a letter.
There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’ I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America, a discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language.
In my family, education was something you endured. My parents weren’t educated past high school, and the only book in our house was a ‘Reader’s Digest’ condensed book. Can you imagine?
Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there’s a detective and a criminal who’s committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.
I’m lucky to have a job doing something I really love to do, and I’m happy to accept the pressures of relentless deadlines or reader expectations as necessary evils. It’s probably not as stressful as mining coal or leading men into battle.
I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he’s a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.
The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it’s sent out towards some future reader, and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text.
I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.
For every SF reader of that period, Robert A. Heinlein was also a touchstone.
The most emphatic place in a clause or sentence is the end. This is the climax; and, during the momentary pause that follows, that last word continues, as it were, to reverberate in the reader’s mind. It has, in fact, the last word.
I’ve been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You’re sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you’ve read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.
The demise of Google Reader, if logical, is a reminder of how far we’ve come from the cuddly old ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ Google days, in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google’s evolving design tricks anticipated what users would like.
A reader’s own imagination is a far more powerful form of CGI than anything any movie can provide because it’s unique. In your own imagination, you can enter all sorts of worlds, and they are unique to you because no other reader will interpret a book the same way.
One of the things I love, and I’m a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.
I love telling stories. I love the intimacy between the writer and reader. When you write sketches it’s over in two minutes. When you write a book the characters have to have a bit of emotional depth.
Character design, like story design, requires a hook to grab the reader’s attention.
The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It’s a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters.
There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it’s gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.
