Eastercon: 'You're Reading it Wrong'

[tamaranth]

I'm writing up and posting, separately, notes on each panel that I attended at Eastercon. They're date-stamped with the date of the actual panel. I'll post an entry with links to all of 'em once I've finished writing up notes.

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Monday 14:00 You're Reading it Wrong: Do you need to know genre to read genre? Do you need to know an author's previous work to critically assess their latest work? Is it even possible to 'misread' a book? To whose opinion (authors,
critics, fans) should we give the most weight? (Andrew Ducker, Penny Hill, Tanith Lee, Farah Mendlesohn, Charles Stross.)
FJM: quoting Clute: 'creative misprision'. She's failed to spot origin of a story based on Christian parable. A misreading can be more interesting than what the author meant. Some writers try to fix an interpretation of their work.

CS: mainstream writers tackling sf and trying for heavy metaphor. "Sometimes a rocket ship is simply a rocket ship."

TL: writers should make their own decisions, not be swayed by reviewers.

FJM: betas are there to tell you when a book isn't going the right way.
Good fiction paragraphs mirror the structure of good non-fiction: tesis, evidence, analysis. (The evidence could be dialogue or description.)
Non-fiction as challenging as fiction ...

FJM: The meaning of books slips. Sometimes can reopen a book to new reading with changing times. E.g. Heinlein's Friday which, now, can be read as the story of a survivor of abuse.
Theories as categories -- temporary filters, multiple ways of looking at something. Genre is a filter: how does this novel look if interpreted as sf? does it fit?

CS: no book is more than a snapshot of a point of view. One can't extrapolate from an author's previous work to their current POV.

TL: "I did have some of my books burnt in the States. It was lovely."

Audience: Art isn't complete until it's reacted to.

FJM: Emily Dickinson is the classic artist-without-audience.

Audience (Lillian): writing is now social, edited, collaborative, beta'd: are we losing the wild creative thing?
FJM: all writing social at some stage.

Comments

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Thanks for adding farah's response - I don't think I heard it as everyone ws getting up to go. I wish i knew more about what she meant though :)

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

I think she was talking about there being social aspects to writing pre-21st century, pre-20th century. (Which I would agree with, though qualify with there not being as much collaboration / social interaction in the creative stage as there is now.) But did not make notes of precise wordage.