If you can actually get someone to sit on the edge of their seat and feel nervous if there's a knock at the door, then you've done something pretty terrific as a writer.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the power of a writer to evoke emotions and suspense in their audience.
Joanne Harris highlights the exceptional skill of a writer who can engage their readers to a point where they feel anxious and excited, as if they are on the edge of their seat in anticipation of what might happen next. This connection showcases the writer's ability to create immersive experiences through storytelling that captivates and moves the audience.
In practice
In a creative writing workshop to emphasize the importance of tension in stories.
One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.
You don't write because someone sets assignments! You write because you need to write, or because you hope someone will listen or because writing will mend something broken inside you or bring something back to life.
If you can still write in spite of the fact that you're not getting paid, that nobody cares about what you're writing, that nobody wants to publish it, that everybody is telling you to do something else, and you still want to and you still enjoy it and you can't stop doing it...then you're a writer.
It isn't just a village. The houses aren't just places to live. Everything belongs to everybody. Everyone belongs to everyone else. Even a single person can make a difference.
When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.
Can one think that because we are engineers, beauty does not preoccupy us or that we do not try to build beautiful, as well as solid and long lasting structures? Aren't the genuine functions of strength always in keeping with unwritten conditions of harmony? ... Besides, there is an attraction, a special charm in the colossal to which ordinary theories of art do not apply.
Design is inherently optimistic. That is its power.
You can't expect someone born into a family with no music...to understand when I'm conducting the Schönberg Variations.
And If the surgeon is like a poet, then the scars you have made on countless bodies are like verses into the fashioning of which you have poured your soul.
A lot of photographers walk around looking for something 'out there,' but I'm very much interested in what's 'in here.'
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