A Quote by Joseph Addison
Authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding-places in a voluminous writer.
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Before you can become a writer, you have to be a reader, and a reader of everything, at that. To the best of my recollection, I became a reader at the age of 10 and have never stopped. Like many authors, I read all sorts of books all the time, and it is amazing how the mind fills up.
It is a severe rebuke upon us, that God makes us so many allowances, and we make so few to our neighbour.
I think a lot of the dull parts of first drafts come from a kind of over-managing, intrusive writer who wants to direct traffic. The idea of taking out the parts that the reader could infer is very liberating, and it's weirdly part of radicalizing your work: it allows you to go to new places fast.
As many authors have said, if the writer is not surprised by events, then chances are that the reader will not be either, and grow bored.
I think you have to humble yourself before the process of starting and running a business. Only the incredibly fortunate achieve their success quickly. Most people, it takes many many years of incredible hard work, and many periods of severe poverty, and it kind of makes it all the better.
If I had to write a book, I could not find anything in the world worth saying - as is indeed the case with many voluminous authors.
I tend to think that the onus is on the writer to engage the reader, that the reader should not be expected to need the writer, that the writer has to prove it. All that stuff might add up to a kind of fun in the work. I like things that are about interesting subjects, which sounds self-evident.
Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end.
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.
If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.
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.
In that way, any world you create will become real. The reader makes it so. The reader becomes implicated in the creation of the world, complicit with the writer. It's the best sort of bond with audience that a writer can hope for, but it demands a great deal of trust on both sides.
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.
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
You can't be up the reader's ass, as many a writer I think is - cute as hell, ingratiating as hell. But that's not loving the reader in the right way. That's toadying to the reader.
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