A Quote by Frank Herbert
There's an unwritten compact between you and the reader. If someone enters a bookstore and sets down hard earned money (energy) for your book, you owe that person some entertainment and as much more as you can give.
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Books are just dead words on paper and it is the readers who bring the stories alive. Previously, writers wrote a book and sent it out into the world. A couple of months after publication letters from readers might arrive. And, leaving aside the professional reviews, it is really the reader's opinions that the writer needs. They vote for a book - and a writer - with their hard earned cash every time they go into a bookstore (or online - that's my age showing!) and buy a book.
There is a contract between the reader and the writer. The readers give me their hard-earned cash, and I have to entertain them.
And okay, fair enough, but there is this unwritten contract between author and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract.
Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life" -- he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.
No, I don't want your money. The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you. I don't like to owe anybody anything, so I keep to myself as much on the lending side as I can.
I don't think you should spend that much time in the gym. Don't sit around between sets too long. If you want to burn some calories, keep the sets tight. Give yourself 30 seconds to a minute between each set. Supersetting is brilliant.
If you buy my book at Walmart, I don't want you to read it. I want you to set it on fire. Because that's what you just did with your money. When you buy a book through an indie-store, you put some money into an independent store and owner in your community. You've put some money into someone's life and someone's livelihood, into keeping the lights on, into helping them be alive. That's a great thing.
My conception of my ideal reader has expanded quite a lot as I've matured: Ultimately when I think of my ideal reader, it's someone who's not sitting down with the intention of automatically arguing with the book: somebody who's going to give me enough slack to tell my story.
If I was a person that felt success is money, and for some people it is, I won't yuck someone's yum - if that's your thing, that's your thing. Go for it. Make as much money as you can. I don't care. Not my thing. My thing is something else. So I don't miss that. At all. Who needs it? How much money do you really need?
A reader's tastes are peculiar. Choosing books to read is like making your way down a remote and winding path. Your stops on that path are always idiosyncratic. One book leads to another and another the way one thought leads to another and another. My type of reader is the sort who burrows through the stacks in the bookstore or the library (or the Web site — stacks are stacks), yielding to impulse and instinct.
Reading is such a personal thing to me. I'd much rather give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, and let that person choose his or her own books.
When someone thinks, "I liked his last book, I'll hope this new one is good" and shells out their hard-earned, I fervently want that person to be thrilled.
You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.
I do really long DJ sets - I play for five or six hours sometimes - but the live shows are a bit more compact. The arch of how to tell a story, where the energy is, where you have peaks and drops, where things go up and things come down, that's all being informed by DJ-ing.
If you've paid your hard-earned money to see a gig, you want to be entertained. That's what I wanna give my fans.
I'm a writer because I love reading. I love the conversation between a reader and a writer, and that it all takes place in a book-sort of a neutral ground. A writer puts down the words, and a reader interprets the words, and every reader will read a book differently. I love that.
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