I've had my dog Peanut for about five weeks now. He doesn't speak English or Thai--and don't get me started on his French. I, as well, have yet to figure how to speak Peanutese. Really, the inability to tell him that I'll be back in just a couple of minutes or that we can't cross the street because we are waiting for the light to change or that I love him can be frustrating.
But the stories are true, and somehow a lot of my intentions seem to make it through to him. He can tell when I'm mad or scared or confident, even though, to my knowledge, I'm not doing anything to show those emotions outwardly. This invisible communication has such a big affect that already I'm finding myself able to stay calmer and cooler because I know that my attitude makes a difference to him.
We're working on walking around the neighborhood. At first I was letting him lead the way a lot of the time, sniffing wherever he wanted to sniff, as long as it didn't involve him snatching something that looked to be poisonous or disgusting. A funny thing happened, though. With all of his freedom, he would occasionally just stop and whimper. Without my direction, he sometimes got disoriented.
It's the same way with reading, isn't it?
I feel like with some stories I'm being confidently led from one stop to the next. The direction feels clear. At other times, I get frustrated because I feel like I'm just randomly going from place to place with no one guiding me. In all the reading that I've done, I've never quite been able to point to phrases or words and say, "Here. This is why I feel secure in my reading." That guiding force seems to be invisible, just like the feeling of confidence I get with some books and not with others.
The idea of invisible communication between writer and reader is something that makes no sense to me. (At least with Peanut I can blame my smell.) With reading I often feel like that invisible communication is nothing but magic--and I don't particularly believe in magic.
So, what do you think it is? What are the subtle cues that a writer gives off that communicates to us beyond the lever of a story? Am I the only one who feels it? Does this fall back into the idea of authorial intention, which may or may not have any impact on a reader?
Over here at the Literary Lab, we've been publishing anthologies for two years now. This will be our third year and third anthology. Sometimes I've wondered why we do this, but it's really not that big of a mystery! We do it because we adore fiction. We adore writing it. We adore reading it. We adore showing it off - especially your fiction. Getting my own work published is a huge mixed bag of trinkets, but publishing other writer's work...that's magic. It's nothing but exciting.
As I've been reading through the entries for the 2011 anthology contest we held last year, I find myself smiling a lot. There's some really great stuff in there. Here are the three main things that happen in my head as I'm reading along.
#1 - I JUDGE THE BEGINNING
As much as I hate to say that everything rests on the beginning of your story, I do have to admit that as a reader who is looking for stories to publish, the beginning is essential. And it's not just what is happening in your story. It's everything combined. Your prose, your sentence structure, your word choice, whether you start it with dialogue or not, point-of-view, cliches, tense shifts, etc. If your beginning doesn't work for me, I lose faith in the story. I tend to read the rest of it with less interest, and that can affect how I feel about the story as a whole.
BUT!
I have read many stories in my lifetime where the beginning doesn't work, and the rest of the story redeemed itself by the end. That's always surprising and happy. It's why I read through an entire piece before making a decision. Sadly, many agents do not do this with manuscripts, and many literary journals probably don't, either. So your beginning? Yes, it's important.
#2 - I JUDGE THE GENRE
Since we love all genres here at the Lit Lab, our anthologies are usually open to all genres for the entries. This has become a bit of an issue for me as I read through entries because there are some genres the really do turn me off. However, this is something I'm learning to look past.
I've been reading more and more genres, and as is obvious to many readers, genres have specific rules most of them follow. I hate rules, but they are something many of us must play by if we're going to stay believable in a genre. So what I do when I run into a story that is in a genre I don't particularly enjoy, is look at it as objectively as possible. Is the writer following rules or cleverly breaking them? How well are they following the rules? Are the cliches in here working or hindering the story?
In the end, genre never makes or breaks my decision to choose a story for publication. It's simply one element of many that I use to judge the story's success.
#3 - I ASK MYSELF WHO WROTE THIS...
Okay, I'll admit right here and now that since we have a moderator who makes it possible for us to read the story entries completely anonymous, that I find myself wondering who sent in certain stories. We are familiar with many readers here over at the Literary Lab, and so I naturally want to know who wrote what. Too bad! I have to read without knowing, and therefore judge the fiction on its own merit. Knowing the author would weigh too heavily into my decisions, as sad as that is.
Still, it's fun to try and guess. I have found in the past that I am 99% of the time WRONG. Dead wrong. It's a fun element for me to try and guess, at least, but as with the previous to points I've made above, I don't let the basis of this enter into my decision-making.
So after those three points, you may be asking yourself how I pick a particular piece for publication. Honestly, it's so many elements combined that I couldn't possibly discuss it all in one post. It's based on what I like, but not what I like, how well the prose is written, how much line-editing I think a piece needs (if it's publishable in that sense or if the piece needs more work and time than we have to put into it), how much the story surprises me (that one his huge for me), etc.
A great story, for me, must leave me smiling - and as odd as it may sound, even tragic stories leave me smiling, especially if the tragic ending was unexpected. I know that when I read the last sentence of a story, if I let out this little sigh and feel my lips turn upward, that I have a winner on my hands. This may all be subjective, but it's a thousand little elements going into that reaction, and many of those elements are as objective as I can possibly make them. But I have to argue that subjectivity is also a key element to judging a piece of fiction. I'll save that for another post.
The title of this post is a lie. Some of you may remember that Ms Davidson-Argyle, Mr Malasarn and I are allegedly conducting a contest (Publication! Cash prizes!). Some of you may even have entered the contest and might be wondering where the results are. Some of you might be getting impatient.
To this latter group, I beg your patience. And I ask if you’ve maybe seen how the three of us acted during the judging phase of our previous contests (hint: slow and steady wins the race!).
All of which is to say, We Are Working On It. I collected all of the story entries into a single Word ™ file so that Davin, Michelle and I could print them out and read them more easily, and as has happened every year I was alarmed and amazed to see that the stories add up in length to a proper novel. So We Three are reading a lot, and having to pay close attention and make critical decisions and decide which 2/3 of this novel-length collection of stories we love best.
I say “love best” because that’s really the way of it. MD-A, DM and I are once again whelmed over by the effort made by those of you who chose to play and I at least like to think that one thing we’re doing by holding these contests is to say “We love you, writers!” and I also like to think that when you choose to send us a story you’re saying “I love you, Literary Lab!” and if you’re not saying that I promise not to tell your mother so mum’s the word, okay?
Anyway. We Are Working On It. The plan is for each of us to have read and decided upon all the entries by the end of this week. We’ll sort out who the Best In Show is this weekend or early next week, hopefully (we reserve the right to miss our deadline!), and have a Grand Announcement toward the end of next week, or possibly we’ll save it for Valentine’s Day because, as I say, we love you, mighty writers.
"Writing" is such an inadequate word to describe what we do, isn't it?
More and more I realize that the true challenge of what we do is to invent, develop, and crystallize ideas. Every time we choose a word we force an amorphous idea into a box and set it on display to be scrutinized. We've debated the concept of originality before--as well as its importance. But, for me, the truth is that we are constantly tapping into our originality, as the simple attempt to string together words and sentences and paragraphs forces us to create new ideas. If the same two writers were to start with the same vocabulary, the same characters, and the same scenes, I'd argue that organizing those individual pieces into a story forces us to come up with something that has never been done before.
We should be proud of this skill we have because it doesn't come easily. To be able to write words on a page requires mental discipline and versatility that not everybody has. Hooray!
This is also an opportunity for us to respect and acknowledge the ideas of others to the best of our ability. So often we are influenced by the ideas of others that come to us every day through the form of words. Most likely we're so influenced by every one else's ideas that we will rarely be able to really know where the seeds of our creativity were first planted. They grow and tangle within our minds, roots and shoots, so that everything we do is simultaneously our own as well as replicas of one another.
I'm grateful that we as writers and bloggers are willing to toss ideas around and share our stories. They are an opportunity for us to learn and grow.
Thanks, peeps. Don't forget to back up your stories!
World Book Night looks like a really cool idea. I could be enthusiastic about The Poisonwood Bible (because it's a great book) and Mighty Reader heartily recommends The Namesake (because Jhumpa Lahiri is a great writer). What about you?
I agree that an author's intention during the writing of a story can have little or no impact on what a reader gets out of that same story. And I think a reader's interpretation of a story is perfectly valid whether or not it jives with an author's intent. The published story, the physical work that makes its way out into the world, becomes an independent, untethered puppy that is meant to fend for itself.
Still, I think author intention is important, and I think it's important because the ability of an author to convey his or her intent is a mark of success and, I think, will ultimately lead to that great thing all of us is searching for whether we know it or not: happiness.
Ah, happiness, that vaporous cloud of a goal that seems to dissipate as soon as you think you have it! Happiness, I contend, will come from a writer's internal satisfaction with herself or himself. More on that later...if I remember.
All throughout high school, I wanted to become a painter. But for whatever reason I didn't take a single art class. I ended up taking marching band. I played the clarinet. I wore a uniform with a big red A on it, which stood for Arcadia. A-R-C! A-D-I-A! A-R-C-A-D-I-A, Arcadia! Hooray!*
So, I went to college up in northern California, and I finally got to take art classes. I took a lot of them. Several were taught by this teacher who went by the name of David Hollowell.
David Hollowell was about 8 feet tall and one could see, if one looked deeply enough into his eyes, that he had the potential to kill people and bury them in his backyard. Being the person I am, I was intrigued by him. I took about four classes with him, each class meeting 2-3 times a week for 3 hours at a time and lasting for ten weeks. And, I swear to you, David Hollowell gave the exact same lecture every single day I went to see him. He would say something like, "I can tell you what I think about your piece, but you shouldn't care what I think about your piece, because what I think about your piece doesn't matter unless you're trying to do what I'm trying to do, which you probably aren't."
At first, his words sounded like adult-speak in the Peanuts cartoons.
Over time I started to actually recognize the words, even though the meaning behind the words were still lost on me.
It wasn't until my senior year, my last class with him, that I started to understand what he was saying. He was dealing directly with the idea of author intention (or at least artist intention).
He was basically saying that every artist should take the time to clarify her or his intention. Once that intention is clear, then the artist has a clear direction for how she or he should proceed to convey that intention. If a viewer or a reader is able to pick up on that intention, then the artist can consider himself or herself successful.
Now, there are a lot of intentions out there. A writer might intend to write a convincing murder scene, a murder scene that makes a reader think that it must be real, that the writer must have killed to be able to write something so convincing. On the other hand, a writer might have the intention of making a reader laugh or cry or donate money to needy causes. ON THE OTHER HAND, a writer might also have the intention of producing a piece of writing that is open for interpretation. In that case, the successful conveyance of that intention may be multiple interpretations. That's valid, as long as it's the writer's intention.
I said earlier that misinterpretation of a writer's intention is perfectly valid, and I still think that's true, from a READER's point of view. But I argue that a WRITER will be happiest when he or she is able to guide the reader to the intended interpretation. I argue that if I try to write a deep love story and the reader understands the story as a deep love story, I will feel better than if the reader interpreted the story to be a metaphor for unlawful taxation. For me, it's satisfying when a reader somehow follows the emotional path I attempted to lay out and arrives at the same place I did. My guess is that when a writer is able to "teach" readers how to read things his or her way, then that writer will feel a certain sense of satisfaction that will bring them internal happiness.
During my art classes, we had a guest speaker come in to talk about her sculptures. She showed us slides of these big things that weighed a ton. One I remember involved a huge cube with a huge spring on top and a chair bouncing up and down on top of the spring. I thought it was a cool piece, but I was dismayed when the sculptor said she displayed it in a park where anyone could climb on top of it if they wanted to. That was her intention.
I imagined people getting shoe marks on the beautiful surface of the cube. I imagined people pulling the chair down so far that it ruined the spring. "And...couldn't someone die if they tried to sit on the chair?" I asked.
"Probably," the artist said. (Or at least she said something along those lines.) "But I designed the cube to be big enough so that people can't really make it to the top."
For me, that communicated the idea of successful artist intention. The artist felt safe in putting her piece out into the world without any velvet ropes because she had thought hard enough about the proportions so as to have safeguarded human interactions with it. Her puppy could fend for itself.
When I write, I think about that, and I ask myself if I've done all I can to try and direct the reader along the path I have intended. I ask myself if I'm okay with the places that can be interpreted multiple ways. That's important to me, and, like I said, I'm happy when a reader comes to the same conclusions I tried to convey. It doesn't happen every time, and I view that as room for me to grow as a writer. Is it a problem for readers if they read a totally different interpretation than what I intended? No, not at all. But I'll feel happier if it doesn't play out that way.
*I have to give a little shout out to my alma mater because the director of 38 years is retiring after a great career. This video is a look at this years group, and they're pretty amazing!
And, as if this post wasn't long enough, I want to send out a big thank you to my brother! Being the supportive guy that he is, he tracked down yesterday my high school English teacher who inspired me to become a writer, and who I acknowledged in Wild Grass for giving me permission to tell the truth. I have been looking for her for a few years, but never could get a lead. I now have her phone number and address, and I'm so excited to get to thank her in person!
Who is the ultimate authority of a piece of fiction? The author? The reader? That professor at the prestigious university? Or nobody? Which interpretation of a piece of fiction is correct? If a reader thinks the book means one thing, but the author meant another, who is correct? Or, more importantly, perhaps - does it even matter?
Scott talked about this subject yesterday, but I'd like to look at it a little from the writer's point-of-view today.
First-Hand Experience!
I hope you'll bear with me as I share my own experience. In 2010, I self-published a little novella titled Cinders. The reception for that story was interesting, to say the least. Most readers seemed lukewarm toward it. Some adored it. It was when I sat down with a reading group (no writers present) that some important ideas began to sink in for me. I had been warned in advance that half the group hated the book. I decided to show up anyway. What's the worst that could happen? I would drive home in tears? Sadly, that's what did happen. My ego was wounded that day. The readers who disliked Cinders (hate is a strong word, isn't it?) seemed to dislike it because their expectations were not met. That's what it boiled down to. Some quite literally expected pumpkins and talking mice. Some expected the story to end with a traditional happily-ever-after despite the clear warning on the front, which says: "Happily-ever-after isn't as long as you though." Some were upset that my main character, Christina, was unlikable, weak, and a poor example for empowering women.
I'll admit during this time, I believed there were right answers for my novel and that those readers who disliked it WERE WRONG. I believed it so strongly that I later added an author's note at the beginning of the novel in hopes of altering reader expectations. I remember as I as was driving home, thinking, "I'll show them what the book really means." A bit stupid on my part, I'll admit, because as far as I can remember, those readers didn't seem to care about what the book "really meant." They cared about what it meant to them. Even when I attended another reader group for a different novel, the readers took turns answering questions from the reader guide. Nobody had the same answers. Some of the answers knocked me off my feet. They were interpretations I never intended, and they were as far from incorrect as you can possibly get. To me, the author, they brought new meaning and depth of the book. I realized, then, that I am not the authority of my books.
Giving the World a Story
I will always keep learning and altering my views, but for today I am certain that Truman Capote's quote about finishing a novel (which I interpret to mean publishing it and giving it to the world) is akin to taking your child out back and shooting it. Seem a little dramatic? Perhaps. But the point I want to make here is that when an author decides to give the world their story, they are doing just that - giving the world their story. The child is shot. The story is up for grabs, up for interpretation, even if that means misinterpretation according to the author. And what is the author going to do about that? Publish a "right-answer" guide to go along with the story? I think the magic of stories lies in reader interpretation. Take that away and you lose something essential.
I do not mean to imply, of course, that the author's intention doesn't matter at all. I think it does, but I also know writing a novel is such an involved process that it's impossible for even the author to have all the answers for what they've written. Subconscious comes into play. Other readers giving feedback. Editors. Publishers. The publishing process itself can add elements to the text the author never intended. So, in the end, I believe the author has her own version of the answers, and if that version is more important to a specific reader than anybody else's version, so be it.
I have so much I could keep rambling about on this subject, but let's open it up to you! Who do you think is the ultimate authority of a piece of fiction? And do you think it matters?
