“You can kill the spell of identification just as easily as youcan create it—if you lose the readers' sympathy for the character.You can lose reader sympathy by having your character commitacts of cruelty to another character with whom the readers identifymore strongly or for whom they have strong sympathy. Youcan lose reader sympathy by having the character make dumbchoices—acting at less than maximum capacity. The idiot inthe horror story who responds to creepy noises by going intothe attic armed only with a candle is an example. You can losereader sympathy when a character seems too ordinary, is stereotyped,or doesn't struggle hard enough. The reader wants tocheer a fighter, not witness a milquetoast wallowing in, say, selfpity.”

“The purpose of a short story is ... that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his (or her) knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love or sympathy for a human being is awakened. ”

“My readers have to work with me to create the experience. They have to bring their imaginations to the story. No one sees a book in the same way, no one sees the characters the same way. As a reader you imagine them in your own mind. So, together, as author and reader, we have both created the story.”

“I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.”

“...Tolstoy's characters seem to come forward to meet you, very conscious of the impression they are making on one another and on the reader.”

“A reader doesn't really see the characters in a story; he feels them.”