Words can fall hard like a boulder loosed from a cliff. Words can drift unnoticed like a weed seed on a breeze. Words can sing.
Shannon HaleRead
I’ve always believed that as an author, I do 50% of the work of storytelling, and the reader does the other 50%. There’s no way I can control the story you tell yourself from my book. Your own experiences, preferences, prejudices, mood at the moment, current events in your life, needs and wants influence how you read my every word.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Storytelling is a collaborative process between the author and the reader.
In this quote, Shannon Hale emphasizes the idea that storytelling is not solely the responsibility of the author; rather, it is a joint effort with the reader playing a crucial role in interpreting and internalizing the narrative. Each individual's personal experiences, emotions, and circumstances shape their understanding of a story, highlighting the subjective nature of literature and how it resonates differently with each person.
Themes
StorytellingReaderAuthorInterpretationNarrative
In practice
Example use cases
During a book club discussion, one might reference this quote to highlight different interpretations of a story.
More from Shannon Hale
All quotes →The rewrites are a struggle right now. Sometimes I wish writing a book could just be easy for me at last. But when I think about it practically, I am glad it's a struggle. I am (as usual) attempting to write a book that's too hard for me. I'm telling a story I'm not smart enough to tell. The risk of failure is huge. But I prefer it this way. I'm forced to learn, forced to smarten myself up, forced to wrestle. And if it works, then I'll have written something that is better than I am.
Shannon HaleRead
Similar quotes
I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it.
John SteinbeckRead
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.
Eudora WeltyRead
I love it when novels contain a broad cast of characters, including queer ones.
Emma DonoghueRead
People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity. Of course, some people want literature to be difficult and there are writers who like to make their readers toil and sweat. They hope to be taken more seriously that way. I have always tried to achieve a prose that is easy and conversational. And those who think this is simple should try it for themselves.
Ruskin BondRead
Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling.
Walter KirnRead
I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.
Tom WolfeRead