Round 47, Hour 44

[pitry.livejournal.com]

What happens when someone completely misses the point of what you're trying to write?
Like, not necessarily they're reacting to it negatively, but just say something and you go, 'er, that is so far from what I was trying to achieve.' Is it your fault for not being clear enough or their fault for being thick? Is it simply a numbers game? (If most people seem to think you were aiming at A while you wanted the completely different B, it's you, if it's not most people, it's them)?

Comments

[sid]

It's ALWAYS them! :-D

No, I think you're right. If the majority of readers get what you're saying, you said it well enough.

I will now re-read the story I finished at dark o'clock this morning and see how well I said what I was trying to say...

[pitry.livejournal.com]

Riddles in the dark o'clock...

[lolmac]

*waves*

It depends a lot. Some people will miss some things because you didn't communicate it in a way that reahed them; some people are unreachable. Everyone is unreachable on some topics.

If the missed point is important to you, and the person is someone whose responses you trust, then you can ask them about their experience and possibly revise your work so that the communication is closer to your intention.

OTOH, if it was a case of something you wrote well going over the head of someone who ducked, well, that's no reason to change anything -- unless you inadvertently caused them to duck.

Sometimes, some unexpected reactions are lovely to have: some readers will find things in your writing that you didn't know you put there. On yet another hand . . . some people just plain aren't the sharpest tacks in the toolbox. Others come from a place so far from your own space that there's no way to bridge the gap.

I still remember a really obnoxious fan on one site who loathed -- yes, loathed, and said so with vehemence -- Phoenix Rising. Because it had "hippies". Hippies are eeeeevil, apparently. Her reaction to what she called "hippies" would have been racist if she'd been talking about an ethnic group instead of a lifestyle.

I kind of figured that if she hated my work on that pretext, I was doing something right.

[pitry.livejournal.com]

Yeah - that's the problem! It always depends. Meh. Reality should be clear cut and simple :P

(nah, it would be boring).

Also, a MacGyver fan has an objection to hippies? Really?... Did they not watch the show?

[lolmac]

She watched it . . . probably for the whump. She could be counted on to whoop with delight at whumpfic, especially torture porn. Under her encouragement, one of the other fic writers who already had a torture fetish eventually abandoned all pretense at plot and just wrote graphic whumpfics, which was a shame, because her writing had sometimes been quite good when she wasn't wallowing in blood and angst.

Here's a funny moment from that whole experience: you know how my longer fics have, let's say, layered plots? With very little actual wasted space in the story, even when apparently innocuous things are going on? Well, this woman -- the hippie-hater -- responded to the first appearance of the Tribe by saying that she hated hippies and wouldn't read that chapter. So she missed all the plot development that happened during that chapter, and the next, and the next . . . and oh yeah, she also missed the hot tub scene and the sex scenes. But she stuck to her "principles", you bet!!

[eve11]

Depends. With me, I tend to think it's me, but that is because with a lot of the themes or metaphors or what-have-you that I want to write into fic, I have a tendency to write around them and sometimes not put enough to the page for it to make sense. But this is also why I run things by beta readers, so I can say to them: I was going for X, did X come through? I think that might be a little bit different than someone reacting in a different way to a particular character or scene that you wrote on account of a different experience. But I tend to write concrete scenes and visuals that explore the themes in a broader context. So if someone doesn't follow what is really going on (eg, my descriptions are vague and can't be followed) that's on me. And if they don't follow my mindset in terms of the allusions or anything like that, well that's kind of on me too, although it's also up to me as to whether or not I care (eg, want to re-write it and make things clearer, or leave it as is and up to interpretation).

ALSO I have written 300 words today! I think I've finally gotten a beginning of my next WIP section to stick!

[lolmac]

Yay!!! Great progress!!