For me, an ideal novel is a dialogue between writer and reader, both a collaborative experience and an intimate exchange of emotions and ideas. The reader just might be the most powerful tool in a writer's arsenal.
We must be forewarned that only rarely does a text easily lend itself to the reader's curiosity... the reading of a text is a transaction between the reader and the text, which mediates the encounter between the reader and writer. It is a composition between the reader and the writer in which the reader "rewrites" the text making a determined effort not to betray the author's spirit.
The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.
A novel is a conversation between a reader and a writer.
The relationship between reader and writer is reciprocal in a way. We co-create each other. We are constantly emerging out of the relationship we have with others.
What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other.
What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other
In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there’s some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader - even though it’s mediated by a kind of text - there’s an electricity about it.
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.
Reading is, at its best, not an escape; it is genuine experience. A novel is not a monologue, but a conversation, a collaboration between writer and reader, an invaluable exchange of human conditions.
Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
I've long come to the conclusion that when people say they can't put a book down, they don't mean they're interested in what's happening next; they mean they are so mesmerised by the writer's voice and the relationship that has been established that they don't want to break that. That's what I feel when I read, and I'm sure now that that's what's going on in the relationship between the reader and the writing.
Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.
Now, as a reader, you shouldn't feel the decisions the writer makes about this DNA, or it would be boring beyond belief. But, as a writer, you're struggling to make these decisions. What should the title be? What's the first line? The point of view? And the struggle with the decisions is because you're trying to figure out WHAT IS THE NOVEL, WHAT IS THE NOVEL?
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.
I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.