Writing is a funny thing, a private act of artistic invention whose endgame involves trying to convince everyone in the goddamn universe to read your words. You sit for years in a lonely room, typing away, and then you run around all crazy-eyed begging folks to read what you’ve done.
And then they do, and immediately get it all wrong and subvert your vision.
You people have stood in my way long enough. I’m going to clown college!
If you’re writing a novel, you must on some level expect and desire it to be read. If not, if you’re planning to write THE END and then burn the manuscript (and then the computer, and then the printer, and then the server farm where your cloud files were stored) then you’re either insane or the baddest badass performance artist of all time, badder even than the guys who literally burned a million pounds a few years ago.
The rest of us write believing that someone’s gonna read it. But we also write in an attempt to control that experience, don’t we? We intend the reader to see certain things, to take away certain things.
The problem? Once we hit PUBLISH, we lose control over that. And you have to be good with that.
Sure, you could get into endless arguments with folks about their interpretations of your work. You could berate people for not “getting” it, or lecture them on how to read your work, but ultimately, that’s supposed to be baked-in. Ultimately, people get to own your work and decide what they think of it. And ultimately, let’s face it: Someday you won’t be here to argue or lecture, and your work will mean whatever the fuck the future literature students of the world think it means—and as a former literature student, I can assure you some of those ideas are gonna be crazy.
And you’re going to have to just take it, because that’s how all of this works. You send out ideas, people ruin and destroy them, and hopefully some tiny kernel survives.
That’s why I plan to be frozen when I die, so when they cure death I can come back and lecture everyone about what my books really mean.
So, you write a book: WHAT MY BOOKS REALLY MEAN, by Jeff Somers, and you plan to have it published after your death. Posthumously, as they say. Because we all know, real writers are never truly appreciated until after they die. Stephen King and J.K. Rowling may be popular now, but in 100 years, they’ll be treated like Dickens and Austen. I digress. You write this book, then after you’re well past caring (and well past your sell-by date), literary students will debate into the wee hours of the night whether you really wrote WHAT MY BOOKS REALLY MEAN, because it sounds remarkably like something Sean Ferrell would do, since everyone knows that you are the Snurtch (goo-goo-ga-joob), and, after all, who REALLY knows what WE ARE NOT GOOD PEOPLE is about? Certainly not you. 😉