I’m a very slow reader.
When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.
Well, I was always really mature for my age. I’m an above-age reader. I’m not trying to come off like, ‘I have a high IQ number. My parents gave me the test.’ That’s the way I was, I guess. I am still a kid. I love doing kid activities. I’m such a kid, but when I’m on set, I do like to be professional.
Truth is often a multiplicity of perspectives, and sometimes the more viewpoints and versions of events there are, the closer the reader gets to an overarching truth.
I’m a huge classics fan. I love Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger. I’m that guy who rereads a book before I read newer stuff, which is probably not all that progressive, and it’s not really going to make me a better reader. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, you should read To Kill a Mockingbird.’
The writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.
I’d been a thriller reader all my life.
The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.
The thing is, the reader doesn’t want to hear about bad times.
I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn’t have a point.
There’s something to be said for an author who clearly respects a reader.
The catchword I use with my classes is: The authority of the writer always overcomes the skepticism of the reader.
For me, it’s been a treat to interact with authors who were publishing when I was a young reader. Judy Blume once gave me a pep talk at a writing conference. I had a short story featured in the same anthology as Beverly Cleary. Magic.
It wasn’t until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams.
As much as I love to dive into the action early, I think the hero’s journey is important – the idea that the reader needs to experience the protagonist’s everyday life before you turn that world upside down.
When I’m writing, I don’t really have much other guide than, ‘As a reader, how would I respond to this?’
I think there have always been male writers, female writers. As a reader, I never picked up a book and said, ‘Oh, I can’t read this – it’s about a male,’ and set it back down.
I’m a sporadic reader. I have moments when I can’t stop… then I kind of forget that I can read. But then I go, ‘Oh God, yeah, books!’
A writer’s job is to give the reader a larger vision of the world.
Thomas Young was born in 1731 in upstate New York. The child of impoverished Irish immigrants, he grew up in a log cabin without the benefit of a formal education. But he was an avid reader who began collecting books at a young age and eventually amassed one of the finest personal libraries in New England.
Even when the characters are supposed to be accustomed to the wonder, I try to weave an air of awe and impressiveness corresponding to what the reader should feel. A casual style ruins any serious fantasy.
O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.
If I’ve vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.
I didn’t know the Green Lantern comics at all. I was a Superman reader.
I’ve never believed it’s a fiction writer’s job to create an exact replica of the past, a diorama the reader can step right into. But it is my responsibility to learn everything of the world I’m writing about, to become an expert in the politics and history that formed my characters’ identities.
I’ve lived in Washington since 1981 and have been a faithful reader of ‘The Washington Post’ ever since.
In the end, what’s any good reader really hoping for? That spark. That spell. That journey.
If the moral good of fiction stems mainly from a habit of mind it inculcates in the reader, styles are neither good nor bad, and to describe some fictional enterprises as false is pointless.
I long for, not a writer’s retreat – I can write in any situation – but a reader’s retreat.
We don’t experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you’re not really gonna give me plot. You’re gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader.
As a writer, you have control of the words you put on the page. But once that manuscript leaves your hand, you give control to the reader. As a director, you are limited by everything: weather, budget, and egos.
It is grievous to read the papers in most respects, I agree. More and more I skim the headlines only, for one can be sure what is carried beneath them quite automatically, if one has long been a reader of the press journalism.
I don’t have a disregard for my reader in humor pieces.
Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn’t suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
I am not a big reader to begin with.
I believe the most important thing you can do in any kind of novel is to make your reader want to go on with it and want to know what happens next.
I love almost everything about my work except conferences. I am too shy in front of an audience. But I love signings and having eye contact with a reader who already knows my soul.
English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.
I have never been able to read Agatha Christie – the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn’t decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.
The headline is the most important element of an ad. It must offer a promise to the reader of a believable benefit. And it must be phrased in a way to give it memory value.
It’s not about what you tell the reader, it’s about what you conceal.
What’s the function of poetry? It’s to express general truths, to connect with the reader and make him think: ‘Wow, I’ve experienced that, but you’ve expressed it so much better.’
When I started blogging in 2004, I responded to every comment no matter how nasty the reader was. I was generally polite, believing that these critics would be so charmed by my professionalism that they would see the error of their misogynist ways and swiftly run out to read a bell hooks book. Ha!
I keep up with everything in terms of health, fitness, nutrition, skin care, hair, nails. Really, everything. I’m an avid reader of every women’s health newsletter from every hospital in the country.
Limited points of view let the writer dispense – and the reader gather – information from various corners of the story. It all becomes a kind of dance, with the writer guiding the reader through the various twists and turns. The challenge is keeping readers in step, while still managing to surprise.
I was a precocious reader.
I have always been a generous and enthusiastic reader.
The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I’ll hush.
The reader need not be told that John Bull never leaves home without encumbering himself with the greatest possible load of luggage. Our companions were no exception to the rule.
I was a terrible reader as a kid. I mean terrible. Super slow and very unfocused. It took me forever to read a book, and I remember being well into high school and still needing my mom to sit down and read aloud to me so I could pass my English tests and such.
I often visit Maria Tatar’s ‘The Grimm Reader’ for a cold dose of courage. Her translations come from the Brothers Grimm, whose now-famous collection of ‘Kinder- und Hausmarchen’ (‘Children’s and Household Tales’) was first published in 1812. The book was not intended for young readers.
You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.
When you’re a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, ‘Gee, I wouldn’t want to be doing that.’ They’re on your side.
Your reader is interested in a guileless, fresh, first-time-we-talked-about-it way. What a great liberation that is. And teenagers, if you respect them, will follow you a lot further than adults will, without fear of being a genre that they may not like or have been told not to like. They just want a story.
There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There’s another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier… Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way.
