Joe Clifford Faust has a great entry about reader interpretation despite an author’s "clear" meaning and presentation of his own conception. "Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood" gives some examples from Joe’s own published books to illustrate how some readers read into (or don’t read well at all) our written ideas, so carefully planned, so well understood…by us at least.
I went to war with my professors on this one, insisting that if someone had a totally different concept of a story than what I’d written, then it only meant that I didn’t write it clearly enough. No room for interpretation, said I; it is what I said it is. Needless to say, it was Custer’s Last Stand, and I was vanquished by the literary Indians.
One of my own that still rankles me is a poem I wrote about a woman’s desire to retain the thrill of not knowing what lay ahead, to tempt fate and accept what happens without asking for all the facts upfront. One thing she does is drive her car at a 100 mph and wonders about a tree up ahead. One of the readers thought she was going for a Sunday drive and loved to see the beauty of the tree. Uh, no.
But Joe is right and he has the right advice for all writers: "When it happens to you, just remember, you’re in good company."
You’ve also, I might add, at least half the time these misconceptions happen, made someone make the story to follow what they wanted it to do, and they feel all the smarter for it. And sometimes, they’re smarter than you.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
I think what Joe’s talking about in his post is “corruption” of the text, not really misinterpretation. There’s honest, thoughtful, insightful interpretation, and there’s just plain disfiguring, as in the woman who wanted to know whether his characters were gay. In that case, the “reader” wasn’t reading. She was looking for an excuse.
I think reading should be a hard job and readers should take it as seriously as they can.
As readers, we cannot help but bring to the reading our own experience, our own interpretation of events, character, even words. The lady mentioned obviously didn’t keep it in the back of her head to summon up, but rather prejudged, ready to jump based on her own quick-draw values. This indeed is a problem; when readers don’t read for something new, but rather to confirm their own file cabinet of knowledge.
Your last sentence says it best–with some modification to allow for entertainment reading for those who or those times when one doesn’t want to “get into” a story, similar to watching a sitcom versus a documentary or drama–and deserves a post of its own.