I want the reader to know what's going on. So there's never a mystery in my books.
I wanted to show those characters discovering it is possible to find common ground, as they make their way through a plotline that I hope is engrossing enough to keep the reader a willing participant.
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!
Every reader knows about the feeling that characters in books seem more real than real people.
For every SF reader of that period, Robert A. Heinlein was also a touchstone.
I was an obsessive fantasy reader from the time I could read at all.
If your reader has been given a rousing opening, he will usually then sit still for at least some exposition. But be sure to follow that chunk of telling with one or more dramatized scenes. That's much more effective than being given section after section of telling.
I'd like the reader to decide if he is willing to pay minute sums for content. I'd like the economics of web to be controlled between authors and readers, not advertiser.
The one thing a lifetime in the newspaper business teaches you is pace - you spend all your time trying to make sure that the reader's going to finish what you're writing.
Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind.
What can happen if a young reader picks up a book he/she isn't yet ready for? Questions, maybe. Usually, that child puts down the book and says, 'Boring.' Or, 'I'm not ready for this.' Kids are really good at knowing what they can handle.
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 think fiction is important because it has the power to transport a reader into another life.
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.
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.
In Sydney, I gave what was billed as a masterclass to bright students of writing at the University of Sydney. But the term 'masterclass' was possibly over-egging the pudding. All I could do was pass on some lessons from my own life, and the most obvious is that if you want to be a writer, you must first have been a reader.
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.
Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite.
Nobody likes to be found out, not even one who has made ruthless confession a part of his profession. Any autobiographer, therefore, at least between the lines, spars with his reader and potential judge.
The fact of the matter is I always have a really high sense of responsibility to the reader, whether it's a few readers that I get or a lot of readers, which I was lucky enough to get with 'Olive.' I feel responsible to them, to deliver something as truthful and straight as I can.
I am an avid reader! As for writing, I might - someday. But we'll have to wait and see.
My ideal relationship with the reader is that at certain points they will have said, 'I'm finding this quite tough, but I'm going to hang in there,' then at the end they will say, 'Oh God, I'm glad I hung on, it was so worth it.'
I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end.
If any reader has lost a loved one or is afraid of death, modern physics says: 'Be comforted, you and they shall live again.'
At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.
I've read a lot of books on the laws of attraction, and in my home, I have a big book on Muhammad Ali, which I've read because he is, like, a hero of mine, but other than that, no, I'm not a big reader.
I don't believe in writing anything that I don't know about or haven't researched about personally. I like to transport the reader to places, and in order to do that I have to do the research.
I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.
The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
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'.
Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
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.
Once he became a series character, I made the conscious choice that he would never act like a series character, never wink at the reader, never pull his punches. Better for him, better for me.
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
I get to show the reader the essence of the book without giving anything away.
