A novel is a conversation starter, and if the author isn't there for the after-party, both the writer and the reader are missing a lot.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A novel is, hopefully, the starting point of a conversation, one in which the author engages readers and asks that they see things from a different point of view than they might otherwise.
Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.
A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.
To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers don't know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.
The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.
A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.
One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.
A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.
When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.
Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.