Are You a Reader or a Writer?

One of the issues that we have as writers is aspiring to create experiences as mind-blowing and real as those we remember from reading great books and authors in the past. More often than not we analyze works not as writers but as fans. This makes it difficult to gain the perspective required to really understand what makes something work, and how we might do the same ourselves.

Chris Huntley has this bit of sage advice:

An early axiom determined in the development of the Dramatica theory was this: If you look for meaning in your story, you cannot predict how to put your story together. If you want to predict how to put your story together, you cannot know what your choices will mean. In other words, you can try to find meaning in a work OR you can predict how to put it together—but not at the same time from within the same context. Why? The short answer is that we use one as the given in order to evaluate the other. When looking for meaning, we assume a particular story structure. When looking for structure, we assume a particular meaning (author's intent). It's tied to the same reason we can see light as particles and waves, just not at the same time within a single context. One aspect defines the basis for the other. Story structure provides the basis for seeing meaning in the story. Meaning provides the basis for understanding and manipulating structure in a story.

In other words, meaning is tied to the audience's experience of the story while structure is tied to the author's perspective of the story. The audience perspective allows a synthesis of the underlying story elements to discover its "meaning." The author's perspective assumes a given meaning (author's intent) and allows manipulation of the arrangement of the story's structure and dynamics. Using the appropriate context is important.

I'm very intrigued by this relationship between meaning and structure, as well as the notion that structure and prediction are the same thing (it's all very scientific sounding). Understanding the structure of something, how it works, allows you to repeat the process and make predictions about the likely outcome. This is the writer's perspective.

On the other hand, the reader can't see the process. They can only look at the effects and speculate about what the author intended. More importantly, what a reader takes from a work is really their experience and enjoyment of the bells and whistles. It's all surface. The mechanics of the thing never really come into it. It is in fact a very different perspective from the author's, just as living in a house is very different from being the architect of the house.

Even deep analysis of theme, history, society, economics, etc. are just more rigorous forms of meaning making. It is only when we have a complete picture of the meaning of a work that we can begin to work toward understanding how that meaning was encoded into the story.

So the challenge is to look at examples and works we admire not from our natural perspective as fans and readers, but from the much more difficult perspective of the architect, the scientist, the writer; stay focused on all those moving parts and formulas that no one else can see.