Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
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.
I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn't a reader yet has just not found the right book.
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.
You're on your own with the book. And while you are writing fiction, you're spending all this time with people who don't actually exist, which is just madness.
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.
The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.
I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.
My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!
A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.
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.