conuly

I'm horrible at literature courses-- my english teachers always regretted my inability to pick apart someone else's writing because "you're such a good writer!" As if being able to build something means you know how to take someone else's creation apart.

And as a writer, I think I'd go crazy if my writing was treated like Shakespeare, or Frost's. "This is what the author meant."

Is it? Could it be that the author was just writing a story? I'm often fairly surprised with the way people dissect my characters: I don't think about them, really. I just sit down and I write them. Sometimes it doesn't occur to me that Noah gets broody, or that Amelia is afraid to love. As a writer that's just "how they are as a whole character" whereas to a reader it's a clearly defined personality trait.

I know that if I published a novel, I'd be surprised and delighted by the way people found meaning in them that I didn't really intend to put there. But to say there's one correct way to view it?

What crock. I hated that about english courses.

(PS: I thought it was Caesar's-- and Rome's-- fate that he die. That way he impacted the society and gave Octavian a chance to rule.)