(Published 7/14/2020, intended to be revised as my thinking evolves)
Mild and extremely vague spoilers for Worm and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
I have published over 400 podcast episodes totaling over 600 cumulative hours of talking about books and movies. In the course of these projects I have developed a certain mode of thinking and talking about storytelling. Here, I have tried to condense my thinking into a few principles.
Principle #1: Charity. Assume the author is a genius and every choice is intentional.
This is a stance, a mode of engaging with the text, that is very rewarding.
For one thing, it’s not uncommon to begin a book or movie somewhat annoyed or bored with what you assume the creator is doing. Your entire first pass at every new work is contaminated with this gloss of your own specific (and likely unarticulated) expectation. If you assume the author is a genius and everything is intentional, your first, second, and Nth reading experience will be vastly more rewarding.
If you read HPMOR with the expectation that Harry is merely a shallow author self-insert, you will be badly annoyed with Harry’s behavior, and will likely completely miss all of the clues as to what’s going on below the surface. You may even miss the fact that anything is going on below the surface. If you approach HPMOR expecting that Yudkowsky is a genius and knows what he’s doing … you’ll be rewarded by subtle foreshadowing and cleverly ambiguous characterization starting on page one.
If you read Worm with the expectation that Taylor, by dint of being situated at first as a Classic YA Protagonist, is the by definition a “good guy”, then you will fail to notice the deeper, richer, more challenging layers of the work. If you approach Worm with the expectation that Wildbow is a genius and knows what he’s doing … you might notice indications of internal unreliability, skewed thinking and compartmentalization that make Taylor a thousand times more interesting as a character.
Principle #2: Inner skepticism. Being wrong about the real causes of your feelings is the default.
Your reading is based on imperfect understanding of the text; you missed things, and you misunderstood things, because of course you did. Your map is not the territory, and your map of the text is not the territory of the text.
Your critiques are based on imperfect understanding of your own feelings; you don’t have perfect introspective awareness, and “yourself” is the easiest person to fool. If something doesn’t work for you, and you reach into your mind and ask “Why didn’t it work for me?” your brain will give you something, because that’s how brains work. Be skeptical of the first answer your brain gives you. It might be a useful clue that will lead to deeper answers, but it will never be the whole explanation.
Everyone agreed that Jar-Jar Binks ruined Star Wars from 1999 until 2009 when Red Letter Media put out some educational videos explaining the broader and deeper reasons why people reacted negatively to The Phantom Menace. The entire movie-going public believed something silly because it didn’t occur to them to think any further beyond their first gut reaction. Don’t make this mistake.
You will also learn more and learn faster if you adopt this mentality. You can’t really get better as a writer if you don’t actually understand why you did or didn’t like something; the mere fact of your reaction is not something you can plug into your model of how “writing” works.
Principle #3: Ownership. Take responsibility for your reading.
The way I read a text, the way I react to a piece of fiction emotionally or critically, is my reading. My reading is the reaction of me and my brain to the text, not a property of the text.
If you and your friends adopt this stance, it makes talking about fiction much more fun. First of all, you can disagree without contradicting each other. You’re simply describing your reading. Your friends are free to respond as they will — either confirming that they read the text the same way, or letting you know that they didn’t. Then you can have interesting discussions about the differences. “Right” and “wrong” readings aren’t even something that comes up, though you may still discuss whether a piece of textual evidence supports one reading over another. Still, the tone tends to be more collaborative than competitive, and I personally prefer interacting with people this way.
The less said about the tribal impulse to actually identify as “the kind of person that hates X” or a “Y stan”, the better. This approach to reading and watching things reveals that foolishness for what it is.
If you really deeply adopt this framing, then arguments about whether a piece of text was “good” or “bad” become uninteresting, to the point of feeling like a category error. A movie can be “good for you” and “bad for me” and that’s not only fine, it’s typical. I don’t need to convince you you’re wrong for liking it. On the contrary, I’m interested in understanding your reading. Maybe I missed something.
End Notes
I intend to come back and edit this document as my thinking evolves. I didn’t start out thinking this way; my very first podcast episodes are frankly rife with the exact kind of mental fuzziness and laziness that I criticize here, and I expect in five more years, I’ll have changed my mind again.
