funereal-disease:messiestobjects:feotakahari:messiestobjects:oodlenoodleroodle:messiestobj
funereal-disease: messiestobjects: feotakahari: messiestobjects: oodlenoodleroodle: messiestobjects: but…what if i don’t really write this way? i’m not hiding secret messages in my writing. the moon story, like i don’t care if my readers understand it to be literal or think it’s symbolic of this or that. go for it have fun, but i didn’t intend any of that. so if you don’t see anything else in my writing than just literal interpretation, i think you got it and i don’t want you to go digging and try to figure out what something meant to me. i have to tell things directly, i don’t do reading between the lines. what do now. It doesn’t matter what the author intended — that is the crux of the Death of the Author -theory. The reader is actively engaging in the creative process of reading. Writing is only half of the job, the reader finishes it by reading. If I find secret messages in your writing, that’s still valid of me to do. You can’t stop me, you already did the thing, it’s out of your hands now. And your attitude of “have fun with it but I didn’t intentionally hide anything for you to find” is good and right — but a lot of people would criticise people who want to have fun with it by going “the author said there’s nothing there to find, you’re an idiot for trying to read too much into it.” :/ can i stop the teacher being a shit to students, is more my question. death of the author is all good and well until there’s quantification through school grading system. Or for that matter, “I wasn’t intentionally saying that X minority is subhuman, but people have decided I said that, and now I’m Canceled.” ah yes the steven universe artbook fiasco. The problem with “death of the author” is a lot of people try to have it both ways. Death of the author means you can read anything you want into a piece of fiction, but it also means that you can’t yell at the author if your own interpretations offend you. Oh look, an entire thread full of people who haven’t grasped that writers don’t have perfect control over what we write.We are flawed, we are biased, and we create fiction that always, to some degree, reflects how we see the world.When a writer sets a book in, say, the US, and every single character is straight and white, that may not be a conscious decision, but it’s a decision that none-the-less reflects how they perceive the world, and affects how their audience percieves it. And that’s just one of a myriad of possible examples.As a writer you can’t simply say “I don’t really write that way,” because choosing not to think about the meaning of your words doesn’t take away their meaning. We have a responsibility for what we create. We have a responsibility to examine everything that our stories are saying, both intended and unintended. And if you’re too lazy too learn this kind of deep critical analysis, but still want to be a writer, well that’s on you. That’s like being too lazy to learn how to handle explosives correctly and still choosing to work in a job that requires you to use them. You’re not blameless just because you’ve chosen to be ignorant.We cannot simply dismiss criticism of our work just because we didn’t intentionally put that meaning there. Now that’s not the same as saying that you’re responsible for everything you’re audience sees in what you write; some reactions or interpretations are deeply personal, and you’re not beholden to every single reader to cater to their specific set of circumstances, but you do need to be aware of the subtext of your work and how that will be broadly read by your audience.You are responsible for what ends up in your story. Just because you were holding the gate and things got in without you meaning for them to, doesn’t make it any less your responsibility. Does that mean you have to prostrate yourself with shame if you ever discover that a single piece of of unfortunate subtext ends up in your story? No, not in the slightest. Part of understanding the complexity of interpretation is coming to terms with the fact that while we are fully responsible for what we write, we are never fully in control of what we write. You move on, you learn, you examine each thing you’ve written and you take the lessons from that to the next.And the bargain we’re making here is that readers need to give us some slack; they need to understand that not everything we say is something that we meant to say. If a writer habitually incorporates certain themes in their writing, maybe that reflects a deeper problem with that author. But just because a story contains some unfortunate subtext doesn’t mean you need to go off on a hair trigger and burn everything they wrote. Learn to appreciate the context of a work, not just the text and the subtext. -- source link