Writers write for one reason: to create an emotion in the reader, to reach across and make them feel something. You want a reaction. Yeah, it's nicer when the reaction is to throw flowers than it is to throw brickbats, but you have to accept both equally.
I struggle with reading a bit. I'm slightly dyslexic, so reading takes me quite a while, and in general, I'm not a big book reader at all. And something like 'Game of Thrones' seems very daunting to me!
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.
How a piece ends is very important to me. It's the last chance to leave an impression with the reader, the last shot at 'nailing' it. I love to write ending lines; usually, I know them first and write toward them, but if I knew how they came to me, I wouldn't tell.
I think what is important for things to be funny is if you the listener, or the reader, get a chance to supply the humor of it yourself.
Listener and reader input is every bit as important as anything any of us can say. We'd be like crazy people chattering in the middle of that empty field that Joe Biden thinks we should stand in to be safe from swine flu if it weren't for the calls, the letters, the blogs, and the reaction from our audience.
History is my passion. So I write what I love to read. I find that if I combine history with a strong, sensual romance, it is like a one-two punch. The reader doesn't want the history without the romance, and of course the heavier the history, the more it has to be leavened with a sensual, all-consuming love story.
I'm a pretty avid reader, but I missed feminism in college. I did take an intro course where I read Mary Wollstonecraft, but I didn't read a lot of the seminal writers. Then I had two teenage daughters and was reading books on development and different issues.
In college, you're kind of designing who you want to be. And I wanted to be a big reader.
I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.
My mother often mailed me articles from 'Reader's Digest' about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible.
Writing for children isn't easy. Kids will abandon a story that doesn't interest, enchant, delight, thrill, or terrify them. But when you can find a way into a young reader's imagination through something as simple as words on paper, well, there's nothing more satisfying.
I think we get too hung up on categories. Obviously, the book market has to categorise things, and it makes it easier for a reader to go into a bookshop and choose, but as a writer, it helps to get rid of all of that and imagine you are a storyteller around a campfire.
While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different vein. I often feel that if I can get the language just right, the language hypnotizes the reader.
I was an early reader, reading even before kindergarten, and since we did not have books in my home, my older brother, Alexander, was responsible for our trip every week to the public library to exchange books already read for new ones to be read.
I have a certain sensibility that I bring to my writing that comes from knowing two things: what I as a reader like to read, and what as a writer I am capable of. I know my own limits. I know there are things I cannot do.
I try not to picture a reader when I'm writing. It's like trying to make a great table but not picturing anybody sitting at it.
We really set out in all our books to say something. Every one is an effort to bring the reader over and show them our theory as to why what we're talking about needs to be talked about.
I think the key is to give the reader characters they not only care about, but identify with, and to never take away all hope.
It's a nice reader, but there's nothing on the iPad I look at and say, 'Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.'
In Iceland, book lives matter in every sense of that phrase: The shelf-life of the book, the lives in the book, the life of the writer, and the life of the reader.
I'm a big, big reader of pretty much everything that Chuck Colson has written. And I consulted with him when I was making some decisions about running for the Senate in the first place.
I have always loved 'Stig of the Dump.' I think reading that book made me officially realise that I was a reader.
Never change the URL of your blog. I've done it once, and I lost much of my readership. It took several months to build up the same reader patterns and trust.
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.
I grew up a big comic book reader, as a kid, and I love the whole fanboy crowd.
I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I've never heard of before.
'Twilight' passed like a fever through the sophisticated reader and the unsophisticated reader alike. People devoured those books in single sittings, over weekends, with a kind of raw intensity that is rare.
The author always knows more than the reader does at the start of a novel, and gradually, they share that knowledge with the reader - that's storytelling.
Libraries have had a long history of dealing with authoritarian organizations demanding reader records - who's read what - and this has led to people being rounded up and killed.
Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while I'm walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets.
Critics will tell you the 'meet cute' is a tired old writing cliche, but the thing is, cliche's work - because they ring true with the reader.
If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.
As writers, we do our best to conjure a world so vivid that the reader can practically walk through it - but we're still only using words and relying on readers to do a lot of work of imagining. Providing pictures as well as words offers a whole new dimension to the experience of consuming a story.
In terms of graphic versus prose, I could probably do a lecture on that topic. But what stood out most was the difference in pacing the language and resulting scenes. One illustration can do so much for the reader.
Calling a book 'young adult' is only important in that it can help get a book to the right reader. After that, it's a useless abstraction and should be discarded.
