English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.
Dialogue is the place that books are most alive and forge the most direct connection with readers. It is also where we as writers discover our characters and allow them to become real.
There's a village in my computer - friends, fans, readers, and colleagues. It's a populous, sometimes chaotic little burg always bustling with news, gossip, opinions and potential excitement.
A good story or a book is all about it's power to hold it's readers still till the very last word of it's climax - complexity in language, dialogues, descriptions, everything else is secondary!
When I am composing, I try to clear my mind of having to publish, or having to sell a book or find readers. That kind of thinking gets in the way.
She (historian Barbara Tuchman) draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human ability as amused and saddened by human folly.
It makes me nuts, the idea that if you put a political struggle at the heart of your book, then it has to be that the author - me - is trying in some way to push my views onto my readers.
No scoring system is perfect, but a system that provides for flexibility in scores, if applied by the same taster without prejudice, can quantify different levels of wine quality and provide the reader with one professional's judgment.
I think anytime you're writing to the middle grades, you're writing to young readers who are trapped in a number of ways between two worlds: between childhood and adulthood, between their friends and their parents.
Question (from a reader) : Will the Wise Goddess Athena overthrow Zeus and become the ruler of Olympus? Athena's answer : What an interesting idea . . . No, just kidding, Dad. Put away the lightning bolt.
I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn't decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.
The literature [Nobel] laureate of this year has said that an author can do anything as long as his readers believe him. A scientist cannot do anything that is not checked and rechecked by scientists of this network before it is accepted.
When the BBC decided to bring Doctor Who back as a feature film a few years ago, one national newspaper ran a poll to ask its readers who should be the new Doctor, and I topped it.
I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.
My first website went up in 1995. On it I ran a feature called Ask Nicola. Readers would email me questions, I'd answer whichever took my fancy.
Fiction, if done right, can bridge cultural divides. Stories can be a footpath for a reader to step into another land and view its indigenous practices and beliefs through a local lens, instead of a telescope.
I think all writers are mainly writing for themselves because I believe that most writers are writing based on a need to write. But at the same time, I feel that writers are, of course, writing for their readers, too.
It's not my job to tell people what to think. If I can actually in some way help the readers' own creative thinking, then that's got to be to everybody's benefit.
The most casual reader of the New Testament can scarcely fail to see the commanding position the resurrection of Christ holds in Christianity. It is the creator of its new and brighter hopes, of its richer and stronger faith, of its deeper and more e...
As much as I love to dive into the action early, I think the hero's journey is important - the idea that the reader needs to experience the protagonist's everyday life before you turn that world upside down.
In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them s...
