At ‘GQ,’ there was never a temptation to pander or preach to the choir because I had no concept of who the reader was or what that reader might want.
A new reader shouldn’t be able to find you in your work, though someone who’s read more may begin to.
Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.
I’m such an avid magazine reader – music, art, beauty magazines – and I found that food and restaurants were pouring into everything I cared about. Whether it was the pop-up concept, or some mysterious mini-mall restaurant, I got swept up in the sexy romance of the food movement.
There are a number of writers who believe it is their duty to throw as many curve balls at the reader as possible. To twist and twist again. These are the Chubby Checkers of crime fiction and, while I admire the craft, I think that it can actually work against genuine suspense.
However, intention needn’t enter in, and if a reader sees things in a religious way, and the work is dogmatically acceptable, then I don’t see why it should not be interpreted in that way, as well as in others.
Anything based on ancient texts is difficult for a modern reader to get their head around.
You’ve got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume – they need to know who the character is, what they’re like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.
But it has also enabled me to find my feet as a lecturer and a reader of my own plays to audiences who like to hear them; and that experience of immediate appreciation gives greater pleasure and more stimulus towards further activity than even the most laudatory of reviews.
I’m very happy for whatever plaudits might come the way of my work, but I never ever sit down to write x with y in view – whether it’s a reader, a prize or a sale.
The one reader I’m trying to please as I write is me, and I’m pretty difficult to please.
I think it’s difficult for young people to acknowledge being smart, to knowledge being a reader. I see kids who are embarrassed to read books. They’re embarrassed to have people see them doing it.
To me, the writer’s main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared – she’s right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That’s the theory, anyway.
There are secrets at the heart of every story; there is something that must be uncovered or discovered, both by the reader and by the characters.
That said, being dyslexic, I wasn’t a great reader when I was kid.
What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence – gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim ‘You know exactly what I mean!’ depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.
Iwas not a reader at all, not until I discovered ‘The Hobbit.’ That changed my life. It gave me the courage to read. It led me to the ‘Lord of the Rings’ series. And once I’d read that, I knew I could read anything because I had just read thousands of pages.
I have always been an avid reader of chemical literature, eager for what is new.
When we talk about good books, we often talk about good sentences, but what we rarely talk about is reader pleasure. Yet it is reader pleasure that is going to make a book break out into the kind of success that makes it into a household name.
I would say if you want to write, write what you care about. I think that’s the most important thing. I think if you write what you care about, you stand a better chance of having the reader care about your story.
I was always an avid reader of books. My vocabulary, my English are all thanks to that reading habit. Reading keeps me grounded. I came from a very middle class family – poor, in fact.
Alejandro Colucci has designed covers for my books that stand out, that catch the eye, and that make me, as a reader and consumer, want to know more about the books behind those covers.
Reader was by far the most popular feed reader out there, and its user base had been in a steep decline for two years before Google decided to shut it down.
I have no particular reader in mind, but a passionate desire to tell an honest, moving story.
One of the ways I stuck out was I was a very passionate reader. There was probably a cyclical nature to that; the more I felt like an outcast, the more I sought refuge in books, and the more I sought refuge in books, the more it made me not speak the same language as my peers.
A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone’s written the story. He’s supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.
If something’s not working, it’s wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, ‘Actually, you’ve gone off the deep end here’.
I’m interested in Scotland now and then, how it’s changed. I want to get the reader to think about that by thinking about something from the past. How has society changed, how has policing changed, have we changed philosophically, psychologically, culturally, spiritually?
I do crazy amounts of research. I want this stuff to ‘work,’ so to speak. I need to be, at least to me, believable – because if I feel – if I cannot invest some element of verisimilitude, the reader is absolutely not going to buy in.
Millions of dollars’ worth of advertising shows such little respect for the reader’s intelligence that it amounts almost to outright insult.
I hadn’t been a particularly precocious reader, but everybody else in my family was.
Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.
It’s funny: I like being surprised as a reader, so it’s difficult for me to spoil my own stuff.
If you are a reader of ‘Harper’s Bazaar,’ to me, you are a woman who loves fashion, but not just fashion; you love fashion, you love travel, you love art, you love music.
If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.
It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is.
I was always a keen reader. I jotted down one or two things, but it never occurred to me to think of a job in writing. I thought that writers were like demi-gods. I don’t know what I thought.
I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that’s made by one person, but that’s not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.
I have always loved ‘Stig of the Dump.’ I think reading that book made me officially realise that I was a reader.
Every story makes a promise to the reader. Actually, two promises, one emotional and one intellectual, since the function of stories is to make us both feel and think.
To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I’m scared about how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this.
Ah yes, the paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it’s killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.
In a sense, there’s a great truth to that, but, also I was a great reader.
I think humor is a very serious thing. I use it as a way of weakening the reader’s defenses so that I can more easily take him to something more.
The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader’s mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.
When a writer becomes a reader of his or her own work, a lot can go wrong. It’s like do-it-yourself dentistry.
My normal life is I love to travel, and I travel as often as I can. I don’t stay in one place too long. But I’m an avid reader, I guess you could say: I’m a bit of a bookworm.
I like moral judgment to emerge from the reader. We are being sold a very simplistic morality by our leaders at a time when nuance and understanding are at a premium.
I loved to read, and if I could’ve been a professional reader, that’s probably what I would’ve wanted to be!
The best way to show an emotion is not through a character’s words, but their smallest expressions – to take what an actor would visually do and try putting that down on the page for the reader to ‘see.’
Our object in these remarks has been not only to account for the slow progress which has as yet been made by Political Economy, and to suggest means by which its advancement may be accelerated, but also to warn the reader of the nature of the following Treatise.
Whenever I write, I’m always thinking of the reader.
I’m a reader. I found out that, whether you’re a studio head or a director, you must read your own material. You can’t rely on readers.
In many a piece of music, it’s the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe.
