Defending Your Work

One of the few things I loved about my college days was taking a class on dramatic writing (as in theater, not necessarily as in tearjerkers). Having said that, it always drove me nuts whenever the teacher, let’s call him Bryan, always insisted that the students not explain their work whenever it’s being critiqued. Don’t get me wrong, Bryan was a well-liked teacher and deservedly so. I just never understood why it was such a sin to explain your own work to people who are confused. Fortunately, I had an English teacher, let’s call him Carlos, who said it was perfectly okay. Going back to Bryan for a moment, his main reasoning for not explaining your own work is because the work should speak for itself and that you won’t always be there to explain things to one person. Seems like a reasonable explanation, but when you’re being critiqued, it’s important for your editor to know what the hell’s going on in your story. That way, the editor can steer you in the right direction of what you want to do rather than impose his own will. For example, if you want to express sadness through colors and you use a lot of red in your set design, you’re going to want to express your need for sad colors to your editor so that he can tell you that blue is a better choice. Of course, this may not be the best example I can think of since everybody knows blue is a sad color and red is an angry color. Even so, I hope everybody understands my position on this. While you won’t have the opportunity to confront every one of your confused readers all the time (at least not without the internet), it’s important that they at least know something about the work that they didn’t know before. Knowing Bryan the way I did, he would probably propose the counterpoint of the audience making their own interpretations so that they can enjoy the work without limits. Maybe I can agree with that point since I do that a lot myself when I add books to this blog. But sooner or later, making a faulty interpretation is going to catch up with you, whether it’s with your grades in school or with a mass discussion with your friends. If you say something potentially foolish, people aren’t always going to be there to break your fall. The other students in a nonfiction class I took one time can attest to that since we were reading This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff and I compared two scruffy gentlemen to the mountain men in Deliverance. Boy, were they pissed…or so I was told. But you know what? It doesn’t matter in the end, because if an author wants to explain himself, he’ll do it anyways, probably through an interview with a newspaper or talk show. So deal with it! No offense, Bryan.

　

***JOKE OF THE DAY***

Q: What’s a Deliverance character’s favorite soda?

A: Mountain Screw.