A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in limbo and doesn't come to life until the reader picks it up and the reader flips the pages.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page.
The book doesn't end when you finish writing it.
If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that's it. You're not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You're not going to read that book again.
When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.
What keeps readers turning pages is suspense, which you can create using a variety of techniques, including tension, pacing and foreshadowing.
There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.
When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.
I think after you write something and you're finished with it, there is a sense of loss. That this is a world I can't really re-enter the way that I could when I was working on it. The covers of the book close it to the writer.
The thing I'm always trying to do when I write is hit that sweet spot where the book both keeps you up late at night, and yet a week after you've finished, it still pops back into your head.
There's a point at which writing a book, or a long article, begins to feel like mental labor, and it's too painful to connect in the world in any real way mid-process. The only way to survive is to write until it is all said and done.