Your opening should give the reader a person to focus on. In a short story, this person should turn up almost immediately; he should be integral to the story's main action; he should be an individual, not just a type. In a novel, the main character may take longer to appear: Anna Karenina doesn't show up in her own novel until chapter eighteen.
I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.
I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.
The reader feels as if he is in Chongjin, where starving people ate the bark off trees; or atop Mount Taesong with the elite of Pyongyang, whose existence is a mix of sadism and whimsy; or with the masses who are bombarded day and night with the propaganda of North Korea's alternate reality.
There is no way for me to replicate for you what a sentence reads like for a Chinese reader.
Honestly, my entire childhood could be summed up with one word: Reader. I was always hunched over a book; in fact, I was the only kid in the world who got paler in the summer, because I'd sneak down into our cool, dank cellar and sit alone with a book for hours.
Of all the reader questions I get each week, the most common question I get is, 'What are you wearing?'
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.
Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.
I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.
The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
It is not the task of a reader to please her subjects.
Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader.
Never look for the story in the 'lede.' Reporters are required to put what's happened up top, but the practiced pundit places a nugget of news, even a startling insight, halfway down the column, directed at the politiscenti. When pressed for time, the savvy reader starts there.
I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.
When you're so close to material, it would be as if you had come out of a bad marriage. You would be so close to it that you would be paying attention to detail that may not mean a whole lot for the reader.
I'm not a very creative person, you know? I'm not really an art person. I'm not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.
As a reader, I happen to like turning pages and wanting to know what happens next.
When you think of a great twist or a red herring or a way of misdirecting the reader, it is good, but you know that they are just tricks at the end of the day, and the way to keep interest is to write characters that people care about.
Publicity doesn't work for books. It really doesn't. All it does is get your name in front of a reader who might then glance at your book. Or not.
I've never chased the dollar, I've always chased the reader's heart. I love having more readers. The more people who read it, the more thrilled I am.
When I need a word and do not find it in French, I select it from other tongues, and the reader has either to understand or translate me. Such is my fate.
The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it.
I never studied writing, but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.
I shall omit former particulars, and begin with informing the Reader, that, in 1792, I was strangely visited, by day and night, concerning what was coming upon the whole earth.
When I put magic into a book - whether it's a wizard or a crusty old werewolf - I'm asking a reader to swallow a huge leap that is counter to everything he or she knows. An extra big helping of reality makes that leap go down a lot easier.
But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that.
Some writers may hate interacting on social media. And if you do, don't do it, because it shows. If you are uncomfortable being out in public, that shows, too, and makes the reader uncomfortable. So find the best way for you to connect with your readers and a way that you enjoy.
The theater of the mind is impossible to compete with, and I like the idea that with a few suggestions, each reader forms in his or her own mind what a character or a place looks like.
I'm a comic reader and a manga fan.
Well, it's a humor strip, so my first responsibility has always been to entertain the reader... But if, in addition, I can help move readers to thought and judgment about issues that concern me, so much the better.
I contend that in the kind of nonfiction I write, and that other people also pursue, anything is permissible provided the reader knows what you're taking liberties with.
The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.
Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page.
I'm a fan of meeting readers face to face, at reader events, where we're able to sit down and take some time to talk.