SF Signal: Overload and Escape: Two Perspectives on Writing and Reading Narratives

[Letizia]

"One of the conundrums that preoccupies my mind far too much flourishes in the fecund interpretive ground that lies between what writers and readers do when they perform their particular construction of texts. While writers compose texts, they do so in an extended process not just of composition, but also of reading, re-reading, and shaping the text to communicate particular meanings, whether of exacting specificity or vast interpretability or something in-between, with some conception of a reader in mind. Readers come to a text with assorted expectations and preconceptions (often of the writer, not just the book) and through their reading construct their own interpretation of the author's representations. The conundrum that worries at my thoughts is: if both reader and writer bring the text into being, can we ever really know whose understanding of and influence on the text's meanings and messages more profoundly shapes its reception?

This is, I admit, a rather daft thing to fret about, partly because there likely isn't a definitive answer to the perplexing question. But when I was offered the chance to review a few of the essays from the e-book publisher 40k Books, I quickly noticed several titles in their catalog that promised to address that thorny, perhaps unanswerable, question. I chose one that focused on a writer discussing his craft, and another that examined the idea of story from the perspective of a reader. The two of them proved to be stimulating, if uneven, excursions into my little obsession."

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