Young Writers Society

Hah, of course what I'm babbling about would somehow relate back to literary theory...I somehow mixed myself with Reader Theory a while ago too. I hear vague mentions of them here and there in my lit class, but he never fully goes into them since it doesn't matter much to our actual class. (We use New Historicism, btw)

I'm not worried about it for anything, I'm just looking at others thoughts. Thank you for thoughts!

Cpt. Smurf wrote:Is this like that article that came out when JK Rowling outed Dumbledore (it was posted somewhere on YWS, but I can't find it now) that claimed that just because Rowling said that Dumbles was gay, that didn't make it so? That she gave up the right to control her characters as soon as the books got published? If so, I disagree. They're still the author's intellectual property, and for me, what the author says go.

I actually agree with that theory, though... especially since I think that the reason JK didn't write in Dumbles being gay was because she wanted it left to the reader - she didn't want to force it on anyone. I think once a work is published, it's out of your hands.

In writing, I think you absolutely have to be at the center of your work. It doesn't have to be centered around you, but you should be there in the middle of it until it's done, and then you can tiptoe away and hope you don't leave any footprints. But you have to be there while you're making it. Trying to write outside of yourself is an absurd concept.

As far as the actual evaluation of a work goes... it just depends. I could evaluate Crime and Punishment without knowing anything about Dostoyevsky, or the time period, or the language. But I think to evaluate Guernica without knowing anything about, well, Guernica - that would be strange.

That's really funny because I have never heard that idea before, but when I read it here, I immediately thought of JK Rowling.

Well, first of all, you can't trust that readers will actually care what they are reading like you will. The general reading audience wont care about what made the writer write this or what influenced or inspired this scene. I would like to think people do, but I have learned that they really don't think about books the way a writer does.

A bit irrelevant, but this came to my mind when I read the first post. I don't think it matters if the reader can 'see' the writer or not. The reader will never own the book, they will never be as much of a part of the book as the writer, no matter how many times they've analyzed and read and been a fan. The book probably was the writer's life, it is something that can be theirs and theirs alone, nobody on earth will ever, ever be able to make that book more theirs than the writer's. It is something unique about the writing proffesion.