4th July 2016 | for Creatives | writing, writer-reader relationship, artist's message, Reginald Dwayne Betts |
"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."
"As if we go to the page as lobotomized creatures who abandon all other issues in their lives to be writers. No, I think all writing has some advocacy in it. All the time."
"Advocacy is a challenge because it is—not because it might pervert writing, any more than love or sex or hope might pervert writing."
"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."
"We know in our deep and private places that we have a responsibility to take on things that draw our attention and to turn them into these mysterious objects—poems and stories—that illuminate, that offer an objection to the status quo, that warn and empower."
"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."
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