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.
Folklore is the perfect second skin. From under its hide, we can see all the shimmering, shadowy uncertainties of the world.
The eyes of a poet discover in each person a unique and irreplaceable humanity. While arrogant intellect seeks to control and manipulate the world, the poetic spirit bows with reverence before its mysteries.
Who says that fictions only and false hair_x000D_ Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?_x000D_ Is all good structure in a winding stair?
Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.
We are persons of quality, I assure you, and women of fashion, and come to see and to be seen.
For myself and my own experience now, I don't really need any music. I have enough to listen to with just the sounds of the environment. I listen to the sounds of 6th avenue.
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