On Authors in Tents

Big circus tents.

Way I see it it’s like this:

The imagination of a reader is a stage. As the author you write the script, but the producers who pay for it, the director who stages it, the actors, set designers and the audience are all the reader.

You can make the stage directions as descriptive and proscriptive as you like, you can get all Shaffer on their ass, or you can leave them with barely more than the dialogue and a whole lot of space to play, but in the end, they own the building, they’re paying the rent and what goes on within it’s walls is their business and their call. They’re the ones reading the lines and sweating on the ropes.

Reading is work. Reading is magic. In fact reading is necromancy: exhuming that brief imagined experience that writers inter in our words and breathing new life into them. And hey, so what if the reanimated story doesn’t look to us so much like the one whose bones we so reverently laid in the ground? That story led a good life, had a good innings, maybe we shed a few tears over it’s passing, maybe not. But this is a whole new thing, made new by the little bit of themselves the necromancer put in to make it breathe – so let’s see what the new kid can do.

We all say we get into this because we love stories right? So the more different ways a book’s interpreted the more stories there are. Everyone wins.