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.
A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.
I saw a segment of Douglas Trumbull's special effects for 'Blade Runner' on the KNBC-TV news. I recognized it immediately. It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly.
For me, performance is a holy ground. When I perform, I really step into a different state of consciousness.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
Some of the smallest things on a smaller film, to me, are greater achievements than on a big film when you have the resources and the time and everything else.
We watch a romantic comedy because we want to cry, say, or an action movie so we can participate in heroics. Horror's different. It can hit you with a moment of revulsion so hard you might want to erase the last five minutes of your life, please.
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