So I've got a bit of a weird topic today so bear with me (very slow day at work haha) - I randomly stumbled across
this video last night. It's quite funny and informative, but it is a half an hour long, so to sum up, the main topic is the
death of the author, so basically the concept that whatever the writer intends to communicate through their writing is irrelevant, because it's what the reader takes away and the reader's interpretation that truly matters. The video goes over views on this in reference to famous literary fiction, but it totally had me thinking about simlit too.
I think there's quite a lot of emphasis on what the author intended in simlit, and obviously that's for a reason - it's much more of a two way street because for the most part, you read a story as it's still in the process of being written and you can always comment and ask questions as the story evolves, so it's much more of a two-way street than what you'd have reading a book. But it's interesting to think about what it means.
I remember in school I found any literature classes so boring, because the teacher would always force on us what the author meant before we even read the book, which just made me go "well why would I read it now, I'm told what happens and what it's supposed to mean." So it makes a lot of sense to me to focus more on the reader interpretation. But of course we all write hoping that people will understand what we're trying to communicate (actually, scratch that, because half the time I don't feel like I know that myself, so if you guys figure it out, please tell me :D )
I guess the other element is that none of our stories are finished yet, so obviously it's not the same case as with a completed one, since you still have plenty more to say in your writing. But I know that with my legacy story I did a few years back, I left the ending fairly open/had an ending that was kind of like a beginning, because I'm not really the type of person that believes all questions have to be answered and that there's only one correct way to answer them. I randomly picked up that save again half a year ago, because I loved those sims, but I only ended up playing for a few days, because it felt like it wasn't "canon."
Anyway, I'll stop my weird rambling - as you can see I'm pretty indecisive on it all - and go see if I can whip up more pancakes because I feel like we may be running low. But I guess my question was:
What do you think matters more; the writer's intent for the story or the readers' interpretation? And is that different for simlit specifically?(And just to clarify, I don't think there's a right or wrong answer to this, my head just kind of got stuck on the idea - blame the video.)