I am a Graham Greene fan – I’m just a ferocious reader. I read an awful lot when I get the time.
There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
I want readers turning pages until three o’clock in the morning. I want the themes of books to stick around for a reader. I’m always trying to find a way to balance characters and theme.
Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside.
I am as interested in seeing what happens to my characters as any reader; that is why I tell kids that writers write for the same reason readers read – to find out the end of the story.
Both types of books – fiction and nonfiction – are a search for story. As a writer and a reader, there’s nothing I crave more than a good story!
Sequencing – the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader – matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.
I think Walking Dead is one of the friendliest new reader type books in that every time a new trade is shipped out, a new issue is shipped out at the same time.
A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader.
I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.
Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.
If there is no love between the author and the story, there is no love between the reader and the story.
In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope. I trust. After all, our memories do not work with any sequential logic.
I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has: the movie screen in the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen.
I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he’s made of sugar.
Personally, I’m a big reader, and I’ve never wanted any of my favorite novels to be made into movies.
One of the most important elements of my identity is my identity as a reader. I love to read – really, if I’m honest with myself, it’s practically the only activity that I truly love to do.
One thing we never did with ‘Bad Company’ was talk down to our reader. And we certainly don’t do that with the new story, ‘Bad Company, First Casualties.’
You have very short travel blogs, and I think there’s a split among travel writers: the service-oriented writers will say, ‘Well, the reader wants to read about his trip, not yours.’ Whereas I say, the reader just wants to read a good story and to maybe learn something.
If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
When you look at ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ the weakest moments are those in which Steinbeck is spouting a political idea directly at the reader. The book’s real power comes from its slower, broader movement.
My job as an author is to tell the story in the best way possible, to make it flow seamlessly and get the reader to keep turning the page.
Lots of kids, including my son, have trouble making the leap from reading words or a few sentences in picture books to chapter books. Chapters are often long… 10 pages can seem like a lifetime to a young reader. Then reading becomes laborious and serious. That’s why some of the chapters in my books are very short.
The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else’s shoes. The reader’s shoes. You’ve got to entertain them.
Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader.
Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer.
I’m a compulsive storyteller, an avid reader, and have always nurtured the secret goal of spending my life as a writer.
Readers want a story, not a pattern. It’s the specifics of a story that make it really ping our various reader radars.
Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. ‘The Anxiety of Influence’, published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.
To be honest, I’m not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.
Endings are the toughest, harder than beginnings. They must satisfy the expectations you have hopefully generated in your reader – not frustrate them, leave the reader grasping at elusive strings.
There isn’t any distinction between a reader and a writer – reading is so much a part of it.
If it is good literature, the reader and the writer will connect. It’s inevitable.
One cannot be too careful in the selection of adjectives for descriptions. Words or compounds which describe precisely, and which convey exactly the right suggestions to the mind of the reader, are essential.
I notice that students, particularly for gay students, it’s too easy to write about my last trick or something. It’s not very interesting to the reader.
I think the reason I’m a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.
A poem, necessarily, sits at a register that’s different from our usual conversational voices. You have to listen more actively to get to the heart of what’s being said, what you as a reader or listener are being asked to feel or notice.
The fact must never be forgotten that no magazine publisher in the United States could give what it is giving to the reader each month if it were not for the revenue which the advertiser brings the magazine.
It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.
I’m not a big crime reader, but I’m reading Michael Connelly’s ‘The Reversal.’ I’m going back to his novels. I’m also reading Keith Richards’ ‘Life.’ I’m always fascinated by the transition from the innocent late ’60s and early ’70s and the youth culture becoming an industry.
It is the test of a novel writer’s art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.
A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn’t see.
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
In my books and in romance as a genre, there is a positive, uplifting feeling that leaves the reader with a sense of encouragement and hope for a brighter future – or a brighter present.
A reader ought to be able to hold it and become familiar with its organized contents and make it a mind’s manageable companion.
The reader has to be creative when he’s reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading.
My conception of my ideal reader has expanded quite a lot as I’ve matured: Ultimately when I think of my ideal reader, it’s someone who’s not sitting down with the intention of automatically arguing with the book: somebody who’s going to give me enough slack to tell my story.
I write things in my house, and hopefully there’s a reader out there who enjoys it and has an experience with it, but that’s very different than a performer on stage, where there’s an immediate dance with the audience. It’s incredibly powerful.
When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.
The most casual reader of the New Testament can scarcely fail to see the commanding position the resurrection of Christ holds in Christianity. It is the creator of its new and brighter hopes, of its richer and stronger faith, of its deeper and more exalted experience.
I’ve often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for ‘Sleepyhead,’ I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who – crucially – would be unpredictable.
On a daily basis there are some huge ones that are, sure, from time to time, but it is helping the reader sort through all this sort of gray stuff out there.
I think a writer’s first job is to entertain, even in novels: to tell a compelling story that pulls the reader along toward an end. At the same time, the best stories are character-driven.
