During a conversation with Lit Hub’s First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing podcast, Alice McDermott talks about her new book of essays on writing, and how writers make connections with their work.
“I think on many levels it is the connection between writer and reader; obviously that’s essential,” McDermott says. “That’s why we write and why we read, and it’s the wonderful intimacy of it, too, to have a reader lending her inner voice to a writer’s voice; there really isn’t anything else like it.” Readers also look for connections in the plot. “We read—I think all of us do—with some silent expectation that what we are being told, what we are discovering, where we’re being led by the writer’s voice through a work, is full of meaning and purpose, or else why are we getting this?” McDermott says.
