It's really irritating when you open a book, and 10 pages into it you know that the hero you met on page one or two is gonna come through unscathed, because he's the hero. This is completely unreal, and I don't like it.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Even now I try to make each page compelling for the readers to get absorbed in the book.
Any time you read a book and get attached to the characters, to me it's always a shock when it goes from page to screen and it's not exactly what was in my head or what I was imagining it should be.
It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.
One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.
I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.
I want my characters to really overuse their coping mechanisms to the point where they break down within 300 pages.
One of the joys of a really good book is that you're so into the world of the book, you forget what you're looking at is words on a page.
It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader. You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That's one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form.
It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story.