For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits.
The reader has information about the characters that the characters themselves don't have. We all have our secret sides. Even I come to understand things about the characters only through the writing process, as I am going along.
I don't have a disregard for my reader in humor pieces.
Literature may make the reader reexamine some of his or her own conventions, look at himself or herself in a different way, look at others in a different way. This goes way beyond just making statements or manifesting principles.
William Armstrong is a great teacher. He speaks truthfullyabout the discipline required for learning, and about the pleasures oforder and system in acquiring knowledge. Any reader, of any age, will enjoythis book.
One of the things I love, and I'm a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.
Every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn't have before. Not two thoughts, or five - just one. So decide what single point you want to leave in the reader's mind.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that. . . the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'
There is all this stuff about how sensitive poets are and how in touch with feelings, etc. they are, but really all we care about is language. At least in the initial stages of the process of writing the poem, though later other things start to come in, and a really good poem usually needs something more than just an interest in the material of language to mean anything to a reader.
The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.
It's great that there are so many different kinds of books for kids and adults to choose from. I think an eclectic reader is the best kind of reader to be, which would be why I was always so satisfied to hear that kids read the Baby-Sitters Club books and then went on and discovered other authors and other genres.
But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that
In college, you're kind of designing who you want to be. And I wanted to be a big reader.
I don't think the author should make the reader do that much work to remember who somebody is.
I wanted to be a librarian from a very young age. Some of my earliest memories are being taken to the local library. I ended up working as a bookseller. Becoming a writer was the logical offshoot of being a reader.
If you want to really deeply touch the viewer or the reader, the theater might be the most powerful way to do it.
An author who sets his reader on sounding the depths of his own thoughts serves him best.
I allude to Back to the Future in the 1985 story to let folks know it was an inspiration and because it literally was the most time-travelly bit of pop culture we had in the mid 80's. I can talk about their tools for considering change. First, the book is metafictive in a traditional sense where I'm showing and telling the reader that the act of writing and reading is a reflexive way to push boundaries of real and literal time travel. Writers and readers are time travellers. The question is what we do with that time we traveled when we leave a book, leave a page.
The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them.