[ SECRET POST #2624 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2624 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


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02.
[Outlander]


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03.
[The Walking Dead]


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04.
[How I Met Your Mother]


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05.
[Twitch Plays Pokemon]


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06.
[Batman, Kill La Kill, Borderlands]


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07.
[Overlord]


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08.
[Red Dwarf]


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09.
[Paranatural]


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10.
[Pitch Perfect]


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11.
[Insidious: Chapter 2]


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 053 secrets from Secret Submission Post #375.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[herongale]

That's fine, if you view writing as a form of soapboxing… shouting words at the world from a place on high, basically a loud extended monologue inflicted upon the world.

But if you view writing as a form of dialogue... of implicit communication with all the writers who have come before you that you've read, and communication with all the readers who will come after you've put your work out into the world when you're done… well, then "death of the author" is pretty critically important. Remember, most of literature was written before there was an internet and therefore before there was any real chance for writers and readers to talk to each other directly. So even though the back-and-forth aspect of conversation was absent, writers since the beginning have often taken into account their prospective readers AS they write, phrasing things in ways they imagine will be pleasing and legible to the people they are trying to talk to. Of course, that's a very top-down process and it can be easy to view it as a form of soapboxing, but for a long time there has been a practice of people reading and writing their own responses to the works they enjoy… dissecting them for meaning, examining them academically or personally… publishing their own responses as readers.

This is all good stuff! It's not disrespectful at all to engage in any kind of writing in an involved manner. Reading isn't like going to church and listening to what the preacher says and only getting to say "amen." You are allowed to have opinions about what a story is about, who it is for, what it means. And sometimes your opinions might contradict what the writer says outside of their story about what they were aiming for, but… if you can justify your opinion with evidence and can summon a rousing defense of your POV, people are gonna believe you. Heck, you might even show the author something they didn't see before in their own work, and that can give them ideas going forward for when they write again.

I think the real disrespectful way to engage in stories is to pretend to read them and to talk about them as if you have. Having informed opinions is not disrespectful.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this response. I get that you're trying to get across this notion of "writing as dialogue," but I'm not sure why that requires you to cast the notion of storytelling as telling a story to someone else as "shouting" and something you "inflict" on them from a "soapbox." Your word choices here make it seem as though you're trying to cast authorial intent as something that is inherently preachy and/or bad, and I don't see why.

The notion of "writing as dialogue" is sort of an odd one to me; I mean, you can engage with a text, but you can't generally engage with the author, unless you go on their blog or try to debate with them at a book signing or con. Even when you talk about "justifying your opinion" about the meaning of a text with "evidence," that evidence itself is drawn from the words the author "shouted" at you - so I'm not clear on why that "shouting" is a bad thing. Can you clarify?

That isn't to say that readers can't, shouldn't, or won't have their own interpretations and ideas about the text, but the author does (and I think, should) have a greater degree of power over the text and its meaning than any given reader, just by virtue of being able to control what exists within the text in the first place. Any "evidence" for alternate interpretations will have been put there by the author's own pen to begin with, will it not? I guess it seems like you're not just accepting the "death of the author," but actively trying to drown him in a bathtub, to extend the metaphor.

[lunabee34]

this is a fantastic comment.

I agree with you 100%.