Reader Participation Quotes

Invite the reader to participate by deciphering. Chaos can attract and engage.

My readers have to work with me to create the experience. They have to bring their imaginations to the story. No one sees a book in the same way, no one sees the characters the same way. As a reader you imagine them in your own mind. So, together, as author and reader, we have both created the story.

The writer's job, after all, is not to dictate meaning, but to give the reader enough pieces to create his or her own satisfying meaning. The story is truly finished—and meaning is made—not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through.

Books don't exist unless you read them. And it's a two way process - you write the book as you read it and you fill in the gaps. You discover it and you put the marks together and without you doing it they're just marks.

The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences. Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.

I'm very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.

I think of myself as the eyes and ears and voice of the reader.

I'm the sort of writer who likes to leave doors open for readers.

I just think it's quite remarkable that everyone says they want to add more commentary to their news pages. In some ways, I think, 'Well, how is that even possible?' It seems sometimes that that's all that there is.

I think a book is often an account, or a series of accounts, that create a world that is sort of half of the world. There are references to a world, and then the reader supplies the other fifty percent.

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.

Readers are made by readers - it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it.

No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed.

What any writer hopes for is that the reader will stick with you to the end of the contract and that there is a level of submission on the reader's part.

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

I've always published a range of responses to my work in the letters section of my comic book.

The reason books get banned, but movies can do almost anything is because the novel is more powerful than a movie. The reader is part of the creation of the story because they must imagine and envision it. There is creation in the act of reading.

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story.

The Web critic relies on his or her readers for attentiveness and approval.

Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.

I believe that poems are a score for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You don't read or overhear the voice in the poem - you are the voice in the poem.

I trust the readers to build their own visual images. To me, that's part of the wonder of reading.

I try to write short novels and leave details out not because I want to be minimalist, but because I think that it enables the readers' creativity and interaction with the book.