I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
What I find, particularly with young writers and readers, is that they don't want complicated feelings.
I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I'm doing it completely intellectually.
My conception of my ideal reader has expanded quite a lot as I've matured: Ultimately when I think of my ideal reader, it's someone who's not sitting down with the intention of automatically arguing with the book: somebody who's going to give me enough slack to tell my story.
Part of me becomes the characters I'm writing about. I think readers feel like they are there, the way I am, as a result.
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.
It's good not only to realize that you can't please all of the people all of the time, but that you don't want to. There's a certain type of reader that you don't ever want to write for.
It's that kind of thing that readers have. I have it as a reader myself: that expectation that the writer will be that person. Then I meet other writers and realize that they're not.
I know when I go and see a writer, the first thing I think to myself is, 'Are they the character in the book?' You just can't help it; it's the way people are.
I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.