“I succeeded in making you care. If you feel nothing, I failed you as a storyteller. I love happy endings, but some readers need the darker stories, too. The stories that don’t make them feel disturbed by their own reality because it doesn’t reflect what they’re used to seeing in fiction. There’s some comfort in harsher stories, and witnessing how one character rebuilds after tragedy can provide hope for the reader.”

—  Adam Silvera

On what he aims for as a storyteller in “History Is All You Left Me Author Adam Silvera Talks Second Books and More with Nicola Yoon” https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/teen/history-left-author-adam-silvera-talks-second-books-nicola-yoon/ (Barnes & Noble; 2017 Jan 19)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I succeeded in making you care. If you feel nothing, I failed you as a storyteller. I love happy endings, but some read…" by Adam Silvera?
Adam Silvera photo
Adam Silvera6
American author 1990

Related quotes

Jorge Luis Borges photo

“Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Discussion published in the Columbia Forum and later quoted in Worldwide Laws of Life : 200 Eternal Spiritual Principles (1998) by John Templeton

“Incomplete stories are make history of life. Their incompleteness makes them complete and generates curiosity in the readers, if the story is complete then it is read and kept aside, the incomplete story leaves its mark on the heart and mind of the reader and reader's start waiting for the end.”

Shabdon Ka Jahan

“Some stories don’t have happy endings. Even love stories. Maybe especially love stories.”

Kristin Hannah book The Nightingale

Source: The Nightingale

Hideo Kojima photo

“Storytelling is very difficult. But adding the flavor helps to relay the storytelling, meaning in a cut scene, with a set camera and effects, you can make the users feel sorrow, or make them happy or laugh. This is an easy approach, which we have been doing. That is one point, the second point is that if I make multiple storylines and allow the users to select which story, this might really sacrifice the deep emotion the user might feel; when there's a concrete storyline, and you kind of go along that rail, you feel the destiny of the story, which at the end, makes you feel more moved. But when you make it interactive — if you want multiple stories where you go one way or another — will that make the player more moved when he or she finishes the game? These two points are really the key which I am thinking about, and if this works, I think I could probably introduce a more interactive storytelling method.”

Hideo Kojima (1963) Japanese video game designer

Source: "Hideo Kojima: The Kikizo Interview 2008 (Page 3)". https://web.archive.org/web/20111009180041/http://archive.videogamesdaily.com/features/hideo-kojima-interview-2008-p3.asp Kikizo. August 24, 2008. Archived from the original on October 9, 2011. Retrieved August 7, 2009.

“The relationship between reader and writer in fiction is steeped in vulnerabilities. It really does require trust and faith because some books have the power to transform people. You feel like you can never go back, look at the world in the same way again. And that grand ambition is what I hope to do with my books because at the heart of my writing is a passion for telling stories of the oppressed, the marginalized, and the misunderstood.”

Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979) contemporary Australian writer of novels for young adults

On being a writer in “Both Freedom and Constraint: An Interview with Randa Abdel-Fattah” https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/both-freedom-and-constraint-an-interview-with in Words Without Borders (May 2015)

Dave Barry photo

“I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Edwidge Danticat photo

“In some of the earlier work, I liked to keep readers guessing: one story asked a question, and another resolved it. For the stories I’m working on now—both the new ones and the older ones I’m revisiting—I want to wring everything out. That way, I don’t have to write separate stories for every character who surprises me.”

Edwidge Danticat (1969) Novelist, short story writer, memoirist

On how her short story writing style has evolved in “An Interview | Edwidge Danticat” http://www.bkreview.org/fall-2018/an-interview-with-edwidge-danticat/ in The Brooklyn Review (Fall 2018) <br class="br">Interviews

Karen Blixen photo

“I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.”

Karen Blixen (1885–1962) Danish writer

Lois McMaster Bujold photo

“I don’t write stories to tell readers what to think, or even tell them what I think; I write stories to show me what I think. Writing is always a journey of discovery that way, as suspenseful for me as I hope it will be for the audience.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

Geek Speak Magazine Interview (2010)

Related topics