Akhil Sharma Quotes

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

People don't come out for book events. They want to feel an emotion and be entertained.

I want to earn a reader's capacity to be moved.

I always feel super uncomfortable when it's like ah, there probably has to be a sex scene. I feel really bad and then always look around to see if anyone is watching me while I'm writing. I want to apologize to people who have to read those sex scenes, but I feel like it's part of the characters life, it's important.

Crassly put: When I write, I am trying not to bore myself and my readers.

I got scared away from the whole writing and producing thing, because of how really, truly difficult this was.

Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.

When you write an essay, of course you're going to get pushback, but you're going to be allowed to make your case at leisure. You're going to be allowed to take into account possible objections and to fully humanize your reader. That feels to me like a much more sane thing to do.

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

If I can be more efficient, I'm actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.

When I first started writing, there was no way I'd write a sex scene. That just seemed impossible. That's why in "Fight Club" all the sex happens off-screen. It's all just a noise on the other side of the wall or the ceiling. I just couldn't bring to write in a scene like that. So one of the challenges with "Choke" was I wanted to write sex scenes until I was really comfortable just writing them in a very mechanical way.

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

You want people to think. You want people to be emotionally moved. And there's a theory behind that in terms of storytelling. It has been around for thousands of years. And that's where something like live theater or a live performance is something that is very valuable because you get instant feedback from your audience and you kind of know the things that work and the things that don't work.

I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

I have never had a point in my life to make. I'm just trying to entertain the reader.

The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.

Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

If you would write emotionally, be first unemotional. If you would move your readers to tears, do not let them see you cry.

I want people to be moved, to feel called to action. That's what I want to do.

The surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definitive, and concrete. The greatest writers - Homer, Dante, Shakespeare - are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.

But huge photographs of dead bodies are slightly different. I couldn't find much humor there.

The secret of successful journalism is to make your readers so angry they will write half your paper for you.

Grabbing readers by the imagination is a writer's job.