I have talked in the past about nostalgia and reminiscence, and in this article I will emphasize the role of writing and memory in the context of writing fiction.
Many people are under the impression fiction is a process where you just “come up with things”, as if from thin air. This is inaccurate. Deep down, writing fiction is about telling a truth (often a secret or unpleasant one) in a different way.
And so, experiencing becomes an operative element: before you write you must experience. Writing and memory, therefore, go hand-in-hand. The diagram below should give you a quick idea.
Authorial intention must be among the most perverse – yes, perverse – things in connection with literary criticism. By the term “authorial intention” we mean, self-evidently, what the author’s intention was when writing a certain piece of work.
In other words, authorial intention refers to expressing a meaning the writer intended. For many people, there really isn’t any mystery: Writer A wrote book B, therefore the meaning expressed in book B is what writer A intended. However, as we will see in more detail further below, this is an excessively simplistic approach.
Problems begin once we realize that there never really is only one reader. Again, this might appear as self-evident, but it is important to emphasize the repercussions: Are we really certain that reader C and reader D have interpreted book B in the same (or even similar) manner?
Indeed, even the same reader can have two different responses to the same book on a subsequent reading. Think of a book you loved as a teenager – let’s assume, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Think of the second time you read that book, perhaps years later. Some things didn’t feel as interesting, while others you discovered for the first time. You had two readerly responses, being one individual, for the same book.
Chaos, meaning, and authorial intention. What’s the connection?(more…)
Remember a scene from your childhood: a movie that you saw for the first time, which made a lasting impression on you. Depending on how old you are, it might have been Gladiator, Apollo 13, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, or even something older. Try to remember how you felt watching it, who you were at the time; where you lived, how life was, how the space around you was; what kinds of thoughts you had at that age, what kind of hopes. Hold that thought. Let’s talk about the timelessness of that experience.
