"It's really up to readers to decide.  We writers fill the pages, sure, but it's other folks who read and evaluate them."

"The only side you should fight on is the side of your audience. With weapons forged from the steel of Good Story."

"Resist deep longing for approval.  One needs to write not what a public wants but what it needs.  The first kind of work is what your need for approval will generate; the second is what your struggle will bring forth."

"What I have enjoyed about science fiction from the time I dove in was how it opened my natural space. If I were reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons or whatever, as I'm walking down the street, I'm thinking of the shit that I just read and the world feels a little larger. I'd be thinking that there's more layers, parallel universes and so forth. It has enhanced my view of possibilities. It's kind of like film in a way. Great writers leave space, and that gap in between is your understanding."

"You write because you need to.  Period.  But you publish because you want people to read your work."

"We need to be careful about the argument that literature always enables empathy.  There are counter-examples: Josef Goebbels, that Nazi kingpin, wrote a novel.  Knut Hamsun was a great novelist and the most unpleasant major writer of the 20th center.  Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a great writer, was a crazy anti-Semite.  Ezra Pound, another great writer, had, let us say, limited resources of empathy.  I could go on with this rogue's gallery.  Literature may enable empathy, but it often doesn't.  It can't turn monsters, even monsters of genius, into good people.  That's not the business of literature." 

"The sf reader doesn't expect to receive a complete picture of the world all at once. Rather he builds up his own picture bit by bit from clues within the text. ... This, again, is one of the protocols of reading sf. The reader is expected to extrapolate, to find the implied information contained in new words."

"It's optional.  Writers should only engage in social media if they want to.  If you don't want to or if you're doing it halfheartedly, it shows.  I think it's important for writers to not think in terms of platform.  It's not healthy. ... Yes, I have a platform, and it would be disingenuous to deny that.  But in terms of getting to that place, I was just myself."

"I hope that whoever reads my work, no matter the subject matter, will be able to tell that this poet is so clearly in love with the animals and plants and mysteries of this planet and tried to do her very best to get you to feel the same way too." (camera owner)

"In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in.  It musn't have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own."

"Your first commitment [as a writer] has to be the experience of the reader.  Since fiction is something that's created by words on a page, the way in which you express your commitment to the reader is by using the words on the page to make an effective experience that someone else can have.  This may mean that it's enjoyable, stressful, intense, or something else.  It depends on what kind of writer you are."

"People Are Going To Steal Your Book: The current generation is used to open access, not restricted ownership. Someone is going to gank your book. They're gonna gank the unmerciful fuck out of it. And you're either going to be mad about it and flail or you're going to find a way to deal and, in a perfect world, make it work for you."

"Most readers just plain don't care who publishes someone, whether it's you, a Random Penguin, or some magic coyote hobo."

"By Story’s end, the listener or reader or watcher has to be at the very least surprised and satisfied by the payoff of the Story’s initial promise."

"I want people to like the work, not me."

"We're taught that an essay is a document that proves or answers.  I go back to the word's Latin root, which means 'to try.'  Not 'to give an answer,' but 'to try.'  Sometimes an essay offers an answer, but asking questions is just as important.  A good essay promotes conversation."

"[The author] then speaks in [his work] for all peoples, for the united psyches that overflow with thoughts and feelings that are registered by the wind, giving voice to the private, intimate, yet connected lives of men and women throughout the centuries—so that many people, listening to or reading the [author's work], hear their own inner voices also, and feel the contours of their own natures, and universal nature as well."

"What surprised me in my most recent reading?  Original subject matter, plot twists, character quirks, anomalous moments, unusual descriptive language, curious observations, sudden shifts in focus, psychological and emotional truth, the handling of time, and formal changes in approach."

"Conflicting feelings snare readers. They're a puzzle that demands solution, a cognitive dissonance that's too noisy to ignore."

"It's good to go a little crazy every once in a while.  Keeps the reader off balance."

"As we read [essays], we participate in the writer's attempt to find what he or she didn't know when first coming to the page."

"We want to see the hard choices and we want to see where they lead for your characters. None of us can go back in time and change difficult decisions we've made in our lives. So we go to Story to evaluate whether or not we made the right choice. We either find comfort from stories that show us that we've done the right thing. Or on the other side, when we make a mistake, in a Story we get to experience the path of a different course. Risk Free! A new map to help us find our courage. We go to Story to experience life at the edge, where we've been shaken in our boots in our own lives. This is what stories are for…to reassure us that we've made the right decision in our own lives or to help us recognize our mistakes, learn from them and find the courage to change."

"I take a certain amount of godlike pleasure in toying with readers and sort of rubbing my hands and going, 'They're never going to figure this one out.'"

"There are gasps and shouts, even some violinistic cries. He has sent several people scurrying to the woods in fear, which is unfortunate, but it is the sort of thing that happens when one finds the words that truly come from within oneself."

"Much like the mind of its maker or of any human being, the essay is mutable and free flowing, wandering and multifaceted, and surprising in the connections it makes.  These surprises cause the reader to feel as if she is inside the mind of the writer, following his thoughts as they spin and swivel, pivot and progress.  Its nature is personal, born of individual emotions, reasoning, and affectations that give it heart and humanity.  Essays, whether we oblige or not, welcome us into their arms."

"To this day, the Slow Food movement wants diners and chefs to challenge themselves by taking their time and making every meal a hedonistic experience.  Should we ask any less from ourselves as writers—or from those who choose to read what we make?"

"Yes, absolutely it has to surprise us.  Surprise is the very basis of art.  Isn't it?"

"As you create your story, it takes on a reality of its own—and as you explore its workings, you metamorphose.  Your thinking changes, your perceptions shift, you become a different person: You become the kind of person who can tell this story from the inside.  If you succeed, then the way you describe events and places and characters will be as a resident would describe it, and it will feel to the reader as if you've been there yourself."

"The same way that a photographer is not fully conscious of why she snaps the picture, there is a similar experience for writers. We are attempting to capture something on the page, a fleeting thought, an experience that we can not quite articulate, an idea that we do not quite understand, and by placing these moments in the context of a story, these experiences can be transmitted to our reader as something larger than we are, something beyond our limited understanding."

How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy

"People don't want to pay for content. They want to consume it for free, or monetise it for themselves. There's never been a greater sense of people feeling entitled to your creative work than there is right now.  And in that entitlement, respect for creative work is vanishing."

"Few aspiring authors want a truly honest critique, especially if that critique advises them to toss their work in progress into the recycle bin and find another creative outlet.  That puts the reader in the unenviable position of trying to find nice things to say even when a manuscript is completely unsalvageable."

"I don't want to release something I don't think is ready. I feel I have one chance to hook readers, so I should show them my best."

"In learning how to tell a story, and learning how to develop my craft and skill as a storyteller, nothing could have been better practice than investigative journalism. ... From the standpoint of keeping the reader/viewer interested, and being riveting, suspenseful, educational, and entertaining, it's the same thing.  Choosing exactly the right word, choosing exactly the right sound bit or dialogue, making sure the setting is vibrant and that the conclusion is life-changing.  That's exactly the same."

"There's a huge difference between writing for yourself (aka journaling) and writing for an external human audience.  If your goal is to be published, there's no getting away from caring about—at least a little—what other people want from your writing.  So at some point in your process, you need to attend to the needs of those readers."

"The reader wants to see the scenery, hear the music, taste the spices, pet the critters, smell the air, and most of all, he wants to feel the emotions.  This is the excitement of science fiction: It gives the reader a chance to be someone else for a while—someone profoundly different; someone in a different universe, facing different challenges."

"One of my favorite things about illustration is getting to delve into a writer's 'world.'"

"A lot of people tell me their stories because they think they know mine, and in a way, it's very gratifying.  The more inward you become, the more universal you become."

"The world I see is not the world you see, mine is in me and yours is in you.  Essays are a way to reconcile these individual realities, to have my world meet yourself by taking an external experience or internal perception and reaching toward a universal meaning."

"Avoid 'explaining' too much and just [let] the reader encounter a situation."

"I don't care about quotation marks and directing the reader and making things easy for the reader.  I don't want my fiction to be an example of the MFA style of 'show, don't tell,' of giving the reader a window onto reality, of lending a sense of transparency to the prose.  Stylistically, I wanted something dense, image-heavy, and digressive, because I like those things."

"I think you can tell as a reader when a character starts making a statement and you can suddenly hear the author talking."

"Saul Bellow says that a writer is just a reader moved to emulation, and that's what happened with me."

"I decided that I wanted to have a record for my sons that would say, 'Wow, Mom really marveled at the world.  She really championed the good on Earth.'  That's how Lucky Fish partially came to be.  And I've never really written for a specific audience in mind until that particular book."

"When I write a piece of fiction ... I can make myself feel connected to the larger human family by giving other people pieces of my own reality, thereby getting outside of my own limited view."

"The primary point of contact for the reader is going to be an emotional one, because emotions reside in the senses."

"The ongoing professionalization of writing, an outcome of our neoliberal moment, has acted centrifugally on writers, clotting them together in ways that are unprecedented.  I tend to spend more time with readers.  What truly enriches my creative life are folks who do anything other than writing. ... And books, of course.  I don't need much else to inspire me as long as I have books."

"That's what I want to do, as a writer—I want to enter into those minds and hearts, and I want you, the reader, to enter in as well.  Empathy is the portal."

"People want to read varied perspectives and a lot of publishers and agents who wouldn't take a chance before are finally responding."

"The science fiction and fantasy audience ... is the best audience in the world to write for. They're open-minded and intelligent. They want to think as well as feel, understand as well as dream. Above all, they want to be led into places that no one has ever visited before. It's a privilege to tell stories to these readers, and an honor when they applaud the tales you tell."

"If when we least expect it, you surprise us with ourselves, that impact is huge. When a setting is outside our experience yet also feels like our native land, that impact is lasting."

"Escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with (and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armor: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real."

"Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too."

"The more sudden are the turns, the steeper the climbs, and the most astounding the vistas, the more readers will connect to the landscape. The trip you take them on is one they'll take inside. It will feel like a memory, even though you invented it at the keyboard."

"I will sign anything. ... If they can't afford a new book, I'll give them something to read and enjoy in the meantime. They'll pass it on to their friends."

What is success in the 21st century? It's novels that invent their own unique form, spring from a personal place, enact a passionate intent, and prove it by reaching a broad readership. It's both great reviews and great sales. It's moving hearts and changing minds. It's winning accolades and winning the devotion of readers. It's finding a way through your fiction to convey what you alone see, yet we all come to accept as the truth.

"Bond me to your characters.  Put them through a fearsome story.  Force me to feel what they feel.  Show me how they change.  Finally, make me see things your way."

"Aren't the people who have had the most influence on you the ones who caused you to look at things in a new light?  Bingo.  Be that novelist."

"Great fiction opens readers' hearts and, once they are captive and pliant, then opens their minds." (artist)

"Write high-impact fiction ... Do it for you.  Do it for me.  The night is long.  The hours of darkness are dull.  We need more fireworks."

"Just write the stories you want to write.  If you are writing about authentic characters, we (agents, then editors, then readers) will care."

"I'm inspired when I literally can't put a book down.  I'll leave the dishes in the sink.  I'll bore friends and family talking about people they don't know and situations they've never read.  In short, I'm pitching to everyone around me.  If a book connects with me to that extent, it will connect with others.  The biggest seller of books is still word of mouth, and the most successful books are those people can't stop talkinga about, agents included."

"The most humbling thing for me is when a reader thanks me beause my stories have actually helped them make sense of events or emotions in their own lives."

"I really don't think about my readers when I write—I am utterly at the beck and call of my characters and so absorbed in the world of their story that it becomes my reality."

"The most important thing is to tell your story the way it needs to be told without shortchanging the reader or keeping gratuitous bits that could be streamlined to keep the pace moving."

"A writer should never give readers information they don't need.  In any given story it's either important or it isn't, and it's my job to feel out the difference."

"The readers need to see what you want them to see and feel what you want them to feel, so if the simplest words have the biggest emotional impact, use them."

"The world will always need storytellers. That won't change. What will continue to change is how storytellers are discovered by readers."

"Writers and readers have a trust.  You give me your time, and I'm going to give you a really good story that's provocative and it's going to make you think and it's going to make you close the book and have that feeling of catharsis: I wish I could spend more time with these characters.  And if you're not there yet, don't put your book out there; it's a betrayal of the trust."

"That's the purpose of stories, that's what they're for: They make life worth living and, sometimes, they keep us alive."

"They are all based on one premise: what happens next?  If the reader doesn't care, the novel is a failure."

"Frost said, 'No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.'  If you're not discovering, your words will die on the page."

"Readings are social events.  I think poetry is written in isolation and is best understood in isolation.  I want readers; I don't want listeners."

"At the end of the day, that's what keeps them reading: you giving the story (and by proxy, the reader) all you've got to give."

"No matter where you are in your career, keep listening to your readers about what they want from you."

"People like big stories.  You get unmatched bang for the buck writing stories.  The bang in this case is being able to plant a big universe and a lot of powerful images inside a reader's head.  The buck in this case is that there's one person working alone without needing any special tools.  That's not going to change.  They may be delivered in different ways, on e-readers or whatever, but they will be around for a long time."

"The storyteller is a puppetmaster. You're here to pull strings and make people feel something—often intensely, often deeply."

"At the end of the day, readers read because of how the story makes them feel.  And there is only one way to do that: through solid writing."

"Write a story that draws its energy from the minor anxieties of day-to-day life, so that when it reaches its climax, the reader experiences genuine catharsis and feels temporarily purged of all those fears."

"It is the imagination that must be a strong and supple instrument, ready to lead the reader through moment-by-moment sensual experience."

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."

"Each novel teaches me how to write it, and before I can truly understand what I'm writing, I need to imagine the one person to whom I'm whispering the story urgently."

"Keep the [reader] engaged, and the best way to do that is to either entertain them or inform them.  And those things are rare."

"We are paid to make the reader love, hate, dislike, admire.  We're paid to torture our characters because it tortures the reader.  And that's what keeps them turning the page.  They want to see things turn out OK."

"The reader will forgive you anything except lying."

"I will take you, my audience, to a miraculous world, but to do this, you will need to agree to my terms, that the drama will be tied to sentences, that characters will be defined in words, and the wonders will exist in the traditional way, with short stories that muscle across the page."

"You like what you like. Nobody can tell you to like something that you don't, or not to like something you do—or if they do, it's not going to change anything in your head, no more than they can be made to like or dislike garlic or lobster or chocolate or olives or natto by you telling them to change their minds.  I don't expect everyone to love everything I write. I don't think that if you like something I write you'll like the next thing, any more than I love everything that the people whose work I enjoy do.  There are Dickens novels I think as good as anything anyone’s ever done, and Dickens books I will be very happy never to read again or think of again. I'm happy to know that my judgment is subjective, but then, that's the whole point of having a point of view.  I published American Gods after Stardust, and most of the people who loved Stardust did not love American Gods, and the people who loved American Gods and picked up Stardust next were often very disappointed indeed. And I am proud of both of them, as I am of all my art-children..."

"The question is always how to be good, I think, first.  And then the politics of the person and the world they create influence the views of the readers, if they are lucky."

"It is a dig at the author's vanity to realise how quickly the reader's eye skips across the words which it has taken him so many months to try to arrange in the right sequence."

"The audience should never know that—or, rather, should never feel that you're talking to them. They want to feel like they're witnessing something, that they're looking in a forbidden window. The audience doesn't want to feel told. Or lectured to."

"When I'm writing about beer, the readers should be thirsty... When I write about making love, the readers should want to make love."

"I like to believe that my readers are as smart as the writers I hang out with, and they will rise to the challenge.  We teach our readers how to read our books in the first paragraph, in the first word.  We set up a contract with them."

"Adults don't turn to literature to learn.  We turn to literature to have great experiences, to meet great people, to have a window into a world we may not have otherwise experienced and to see some of ourselves."

"I do believe that making one's book free remains an effective way to reach new readers who might not otherwise take a chance on your book.  I've had a number of positive reviews from readers who said they liked my book but would never have downloaded if it weren't free.  I do not agree with the argument that an author who makes his book free is inviting bad reviews from those readers who are trying a novel that is not in their preferred genre and may be less inclined to like it.  I believe a good book is a good book, and anything you can do to attract a new reader is worthwhile."

"For art to be able to work, for art to be able to rise to its full potential, there needs to be an active collaboration between the artist and the person enjoying the art.  You need to allow your reader to have things happen as they're reading.  They need to do a little bit of the work.  If you're telling them how to feel, you're not collaborating with your reader, and it's not going to be an effective piece of writing because they're not in it.  They're being dictated to.  If you're able to give them a set of events and they do the alchemy inside themselves and experience the emotions for themselves, it becomes a more effective piece of art."

"If I seduce you into feeling something... then you will decide for yourself what you'll do with that feeling."

"I just held up the book and I said, 'This is my point.  The book is my point.'  It's my artistic expression I'm trying to communicate to you.  I don't know what I'm communicating, I'm making art.  I want to turn you on somehow and I hope you communicate back with me.  That's it.  That's my point.  I'm not trying to push an agenda on anybody.  That's for politics.  That's for essays.  That's for standing on a soap box."