"At the beginning, when I started to show my writing to people, to give
readings from it, I had no audience. No one has an audience at the
start, because no one is waiting. Certainly not for your work. To think
that would be delusional. There was no audience for my writing. To the
extent that I have one now, it is because, over time, say, 25 years of
my writing’s being published, people called readers have come upon a
story or novel or essay of mine and thought, I’d like to read more. This
amazing relationship — a reader finding a writer whom he or she would
like to read — begins accidentally and might become a habit or practice.
If I think about readers who look forward to my next novel, I feel
inspired to finish it. Those readers are important to me, though I don’t
write for them. I certainly don’t want to disappoint them with a poor
book or story; but I don’t write for them. I’m encouraged by the thought
of them. In a real sense, readers are more important than writers.
There are too many of us anyway, and too many write books that are
nothing more than words used poorly in sentences that don’t signify in
novels or stories that are primarily thoughtless. But readers — all
readers should exist!"
LYNNE TILLMAN
What Would Lynne Tillman Do?
Red Lemonade, 2014
www.redlemona.de
