It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
At least for me, writing a book is continual exposure to blind spots. There were things I wanted to be true and wanted to believe, but it always got more complicated in the fiction.
I'm an avid reader myself, and what any one reader accesses at any one time is very powerful and personal to them. Clearly you can't even begin to touch that. A novel is a singular vision, and then a myriad of readers have their own experience of that.
I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books.
Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.
I read all the time. Sometimes I get asked if I've thought about writing a novel.
There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer - reading is so much a part of it.
Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.
Writing is such a solitary thing, so it's nice, when I'm discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.
When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.