My response to my own most recent post

I am still thinking about my last post. I heard/read a few days ago that “parenthood is a continual process of letting go.” That’s what I think writing is, too. The things we write are our progeny, of a sort. We create them from nothing, grow them, birth them, nurture them, then give them to the world where they take on a life of their own. I think it’s easy to want to be prescriptive with our creations, to determine what they are and how they should be perceived. With my daughters, I want to believe I can choose who they are. I say “Avary is this” and “Olivia is that,” but as soon as I say they are one thing, they change and become something else. And when I am away, they will often behave in ways (and give people opinions of them) that are incompatible with my perceptions of them. I can only believe that this is going to continue to happen to a distressing degree (for me, at least) potentially for the rest of their lives (or at least mine). I think the same thing goes for texts. Writers are their biological parents, but they will be influenced by their environment, by time, by social attitudes, by individual readers’ backgrounds, etc.

A professor once wrote on one of my papers that I seemed to imply that the writer was trying to put a message into their fictional text, and he said that writers do not put messages into their texts and that if they wanted to do that they would write an essay instead. I’m not sure I entirely agree. I know, as a writer, that I do usually try to have a general idea of what I’m trying to get across in a story. But sometimes in a workshop I realize that I have not succeeded or that it is being read in a different way than I intended. Sometimes this makes me alter my story, but sometimes I find the other readings interesting and leave it as it is. Recently, I have been doing genre research and came across this quote by John Frow: “Complex aesthetic texts...are rarely contained by the limits of a single genre.” This suggests that a multiplicity of readings is a good thing, that it speaks to the complexity of the text. I agree. I tend to think that if something can be read in many ways, it is more interesting than if it can only be read one way.