Thoughts About Reading

The sum of a text is the collaboration between writer and reader. Every writer begins as a reader learning how to interpret letters, sentences, paragraphs, stories. Take these interpretations to a fresh blank page. A single line in a new work can act as a hyperlink to an interpretation of another. But it takes the mind of the reader to click onto and parse that hyperlink. The place where the reader's thoughts collide with the writer's creates a crater of depth able to be mined for precious minerals.

Part of the fun of reading is pairing your imagination with the writer's like a good wine and cheese. Part of the fun of writing is leaving broader implications to the reader's imagination. Just as one cannot articulate every little train of thought into speech, the writer cannot put down every facet of a character or world. And why should they? Sometimes it's fun to ask people to guess. Guess what I found under the seat of the bus, guess what I bought you for your birthday, guess who I saw in the park. Guess why the curtains are blue, I've given you the clues. A great writer lets their work be a bit of a puzzle. A great reader finds enjoyment in being challenged.

As Thomas C. Foster writes in How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2014)
"We tend to give writers all the credit, but reading is also an event of the imagination; our creativity, our inventiveness, encounters those of the writer, and in that meeting we puzzle out what she means, what we understand her to mean, what uses we can put her writing to."

There are perils in this mutual work. A writer may distrust their reader and try to get ahead of any interpretations by making their themes plain or including no symbolism at all. A fear of the reader making a bad faith claim. As Foster continues,
"Imagination isn't fantasy. That is to say, we can't simply invent meaning without the writer, or if we can, we ought not to hold her to it."

Yes, there is risk of misinterpretation, but why should we preemptively leave our windows plain or bare in fear that bad actors will rip our curtains down and throw them in the trash. They will do that whether the curtains are blue or pure white, and they will break our windows too.

A responsible reader responds to what actually appears in the text. This is why any good analysis of a story is asked to prove itself with examples and direct quotes. Evidence of your interpretation through the context of the story. So that it can then be agreed with or refuted by others who have also read the text.

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And Now a Gripe

People who read on AO3 tend to say things like "I back out of a fic if there's SPAG issues and especially if the paragraphs are too dense." (I read a lot of fandom secrets. I have seen this sentiment on so many secrets about AO3.)

I simply do not understand this sentiment and also I am offended as the king of typos and as a long paragraph enjoyer. Honestly ever since I started using that site I've had difficulty with trying to format my writing into the site's "style." I dislike breaking up my paragraphs. Sometimes a thematic idea spans more than just a few lines, okay.

Not that I'm going to post it on AO3 (for reasons beyond this post), but I'm editing a fic right now and I still keep thinking about where to chop it up. There are perfectly good reasons to divide lines, one of them not being because it's "too long."

Relatedly-ish. I cannot stand the way French novels do dialogue. Why is the actual dialog and the tags and/or actions in one ambiguous long line (Yes, yes, the tenses delineate I know, I just don't clock them that quickly). (Maybe it's also a newer style or just with translations that there's no guillemets? Emmanuel Carrère's La Moustache has guillemets, but I haven't seen them in other books so far.) It drives me crazy. However, I'm not a little weak ass about it.

I have made it a mission to bring this frustration to English readers in another fic I am working on where when they talk in French I am going to use this horrible style of punctuation. Also not gonna post that one on AO3, but to anyone who would absolutely hate this and leave I have but one response:

— Then perish, I say as the room is suddenly tinted red. Your focus is brought to the look of apathy in my eyes. Die mad about it.