Every so often, I have an encounter with readers (usually academics, but sometimes not) who are happy to tell me, in detail and at great length, all the reasons why I wrote something, or wrote it in this or that particular way. (Usually because they object to the reasons they’ve come up with…but I digress.)
And to date, they have always been dead wrong. Every time.
The most common incident of this sort involves discussing my “feminist agenda” in Dealing with Dragons…things like making “King of the Dragons” a job title unconnected with gender, Cimorene’s unconventional personality, and so on. And I’m not going to deny that there’s a whole bunch of feminist subtext that can be read into that book. What bothers me is the assumption that I had some kind of feminist agenda, and made all those decisions consciously and deliberately in service of it.
In point of fact, while a lot of those decisions were made consciously and deliberately, they were made for reasons of story, not for reasons of politics. “King of the Dragons” is a job title because when my characters met their first dragon in Talking to Dragons (which was written and published first, a fact that readers of this particular sort invariably either miss or forget), I wanted it to be clear that dragons thought differently from humans. Cimorene’s personality and background were also laid out in that first book as a very minor subplot. And so on.
The same thing happens to one of my writer-friends who has some really cool and interesting politics in his books. Readers keep speculating about how they fit with his real-life political positions, and expecting him to be seriously interested in politics in a major way…when in fact, the politics are what they are because that’s what he needed them to be to get the plot he wanted.
And another friend got the same thing from an economics geek, only she was too polite to explain that she’s apolitical and economic theory bores her to tears–it was the characters she cared about.
It never fails to baffle me how many people are willing not only to tell me what I think, but to argue with me when I say they’re wrong. Excuse me? I’m the one in here doing my thinking; from out there, you can’t get more than a very general idea of what that is, and then only if you know me pretty well or if I’ve actually said “This is what I think.”
And sometimes, not even then.
People forget that authors tell lies for a living. Even when we’re trying to explain clearly how and why we came up with something, a lot of us fall back on metaphor and analogy, and from there it’s a very short step to the tiny exaggeration that makes for a better story…followed by more and larger exaggerations.
And when it comes to talking about the writing process itself…well, people have been trying to pin down how creativity works for centuries, without much luck. It’s a whole lot easier to talk about the visible parts of the process (the history class that got the writer interested in medieval France, the flight of birds over a lake that got the writer wondering about passenger pigeons, the news story about physics research that got the writer wondering just what sort of person does that) than it is to talk about how and why a particular phrase or image or smell or bit of knowledge strike sparks in the writer’s brain and start a story-fire. Especially since the how and why parts are even more individual than the what.
Supposedly Robert Browning said this once (supposedly because I can’t find the source)
“Robert Browning was once asked the meaning of one of his more difficult poems. ‘Madam,’ he replied, ‘When I wrote that only God and I knew what it meant. Now only God knows.'”
Group discussions in English Lit sometimes veer into bazaar interpretations, and once you start over-analyzing it’s hard to stop. Maybe the urge to analyze spills over into regular reading -and you get people explaining how `this is REALLY what you were saying’ with scholarly intensity. (I should add here that I love my collage Lit classes. But discussions do occasionally drift into the weird.)
Chicory–I don’t really mind people over-analyzing the text (and I can’t stop them anyway). It’s when they tell me what my opinions are and/or what my process is that I get cranky. I mean, even if they’d been there, which they weren’t, they can’t see the inside of my brain. Unless Lit profs are all secretly telepathic aliens, which I suppose is possible.
Oh, the universe is trying to tell me something.
I just finished a book with which one of my chief problems was that it seemed like a venue for the author to inflict several of her own opinions on the readership.
I know, I *know* that part of the point of writing is that it’s fictional – you can create any character with any opinion or feeling, not just characters like yourself.
This is the second blog post I’ve read in as many days that warns people not to assume too much about an author’s thought processes. Okay, universe! I know when to take a hint. I will try to, at the very least, be less adamant about believing that I’m reading a thinly-veiled personal rant in the future.
(As for the assumption of a political or feminist agenda, etc. – I completely understand that. I wrote a paper in college once which we then exchanged with a partner, and the partner presented it to the class. My partner was supremely impressed with [and explained to the class] what I was saying and what I meant by this and that… none of which I ever intended at all.)
I am sure that no matter your reasons for any of the decisions you make while writing, they are good ones. 🙂 (King of the Dragons as a genderless title? Awesome!)
Julie – There’s an old story, probably apocryphal, that I like very much, about someone applying for a professorship at a college who was asked to analyze a poem. The applicant was turned down, because the committe said she’d gotten the analysis wrong. So she wrote to the poet, who informed the committee that that was *exactly* what he’d meant, and she was the only person in years who’d gotten it right.
Whereupon the committee met…and decided that from then on, they would only ask candidates to analyze *dead* poets.
Yes, there are authors who use their fiction as a forum for promoting their cherished beliefs. And sometimes it *does* seem obvious. But sometimes, it’s that the author was trying to stretch by doing some different characters…and didn’t quite manage. I generally prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt, at least for the first book. If they keep it up…well, sometimes I don’t really *care* whether the opinions belong to the author or to the characters; I’m just not interested in having that with my fiction, thanks.