In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of engaging a wider audience in writing, beyond just personal connections.
Lionel Shriver reflects on the writing process, highlighting that a writer must consider the perspective of readers they have never met. This approach necessitates a critical examination of one's prose to ensure it captivates and maintains the interest of a broader audience, reinforcing the notion that writing is a communication tool that transcends personal interactions.
In practice
This quote can be used during a writing workshop to encourage participants to think about their audience.
Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.
For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.
In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.
Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.
The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the starts.
Occasionally, in times of worry, I've longed to be stylish, but on second thought I say no-just let me be myself-and express rough, yet true things with rough workmanship.
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
So, for instance, if you came to me, I'd ask, 'Do you want to write? Do you want to improvise? Why do you want to play this instrument? What do you want to do?'
I often feel like a nutty professor, like I'm going to try this experiment and see if it works. My hypothesis is, people in the West can absorb African women stories without any shaken or stirred mixer. It can come directly from the source.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.