The day a character becomes predictable is the day a writer should think about moving on – because the reader certainly will.
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
Even though I was a reluctant reader in junior high and high school, I found myself writing poems in the back of class.
A system of education, which would not gratify this disposition in any party, is requisite, in order to obviate the difficulty, and the reader will find a something said to that purpose in perusing this tract.
I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.
I was reading some Raymond Carver. I really liked how he did that ‘slice of life’ thing. Because I’m not much of a reader I end up finding out about these things a long time after other people.
The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader’s mind are unpredictable.
As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.
A book cannot apologize for what people may think it should be. It has to be authoritative. That’s what I want as a reader – I want to be confident that the book will do its job.
In music, you can use metaphors with ease – if a person doesn’t understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author.
The way a book is read, which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.
A savage review is much more entertaining for the reader than an admiring one; the little misanthrope in each of us relishes the rubbishing of someone else.
It’s a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader. You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That’s one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form.
I’ve always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.
I’m a voracious reader.
I have turned away from the thought of writing fiction in the past through what I suppose is, actually, fear. The direct, raw invitation for the reader to come in and explore my imagination is fairly scary for me so I have busied myself with so much else.
For success, the author must make the reader care about the destiny of the principals, and sustain this anxiety, or suspense, for about 100,000 words.
I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‘what happens’ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.
I was not a big comic-book reader.
I think some days you should do a cartoon that is absolutely just for the laugh, and some days you should do a cartoon that just punches the reader right in the stomach. It’s kind of nice to mix it up.
A true epilogue is removed from the story in time or space. That’s the reason it is called an ‘Epilogue’; the label serves to alert the reader that the story itself is over, but we are going to now see a distant result or consequence of that story.
Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
Nobody has ever written as many enjoyable, fun-to-read crime novels as Agatha Christie. It’s all about the storytelling and the pleasure of the reader. She doesn’t want to be deep or highbrow.
As a child, I was an obsessive reader, as was everybody in my family all winter long with my father. I think I was only 8 when I read Edward Gibbon’s ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.’
I’m a known reader. That’s what I do with my time.
I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don’t feel like I’m meeting someone who feels real, I’m not going to be compelled to read further.
There’s a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don’t believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.
What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.
Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader’s daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.
When I got out of college in 1991, I had four jobs in four different parts of L.A. There was I Love Juicy, a smoothie bar in Venice, and the Videotheque on Sunset Boulevard, across from the old Tower Records. I was also an intern at the ‘Los Angeles Reader’ in the Miracle Mile and at ‘High Performance’ magazine downtown.
Some of the writers I admire who seem very, very funny and very emotional to me can develop a closeness with the reader without giving too much of themselves away. Lorrie Moore comes to mind, as does David Sedaris. When they write, the reader thinks that they’re being trusted as a friend.
If you are writing a thriller with violence in it, the ending must be violent. You are delivering a promise to your reader.
I was a good sight reader and I could sing two or three of these jingles a day. An orchestra would come in for half an hour, and then the singers would come in and knock ’em out, and go on to the next one. I was the voice of Budweiser and Almond Joy.
The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.
There is always a temptation to take things for granted, to get lazy, and to presume that the reader knows more than they do.
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
‘Drown’ was always a hybrid book. It’s connected stories – partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more – story, novel, neither, both.
In fiction, it’s a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.
In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in. It mustn’t have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own.
Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I’m not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.
I read hugely as a child, but I slowed up when the print got smaller. I am a very slow reader. I don’t know why. Maybe it is like some people chewing their food for ages and some wolfing it down.
Your protagonist is your reader’s portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you’re creating. They don’t have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.
I really like it when you can step outside of what’s come before and find a surprise for the reader and find a surprise for yourself.
I like using animals because they help suspend my reader’s disbelief. We have certain ideas about dentists. We don’t have many ideas about rhinoceros dentists.
I was a very keen reader of science fiction.
I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.
I read while the kids play. I can see them from the kitchen window. And I’m a fast reader.
I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn’t a reader yet has just not found the right book.
You give the reader a sense of a full meal.
A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it’s another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don’t know what they’ve made until they’ve made it.
One hopes that with a book or movie, the reader or the audience will emerge from it thinking. That’s the most you can hope for: that you’ve raised questions that will be there for the audience to think about later.
My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.
I’ve had mainstream readers complain that the book is really a romance, and romance readers complain that the book isn’t a romance – with the same book! It really depends on the individual reader’s expectations going into the story, and that’s very hard to predict person to person.
