Who Owns The Story?

After yesterday's brief foray outside of my normal stomping grounds, I return to you with a post that is the bread and butter of this blog: more randomly formed, barely cogent thoughts about writing from somebody hardly qualified to be so opinionated. But that's what blogs are all about, baby; you don't need to know what you're talking about to feel strongly about a thing. You just need to be convincing. Or not even convincing; interesting would probably do just fine, in a pinch.

I was looking over the manuscript for "the book formerly known as the Fallen, except there's already like a hundred goddamn books with that title, so some good friends helped me come up with a much better title." No, that's not the new title; it's just a personal anecdote that's masquerading as the title, since this new title is so good and for some reason, I'm feeling strangely protective of it at the moment. I don't know. It's also why I haven't posted any chapters or excerpts yet. I just have this feeling, like that this thing is a fledgling and if I let too many people touch it, its mother won't take it back and it will starve to death or be eaten by a hawk.

Does that make sense? It doesn't? It doesn't and it sounds like I'm blogging drunk again? Well, I can assure you that the drunk thing is simply not true, I've actually been doing very well on the whole "not drinking" part of things, mostly because I started to read that rambling post about the desert and three paragraphs in, I wanted to kill myself. The only reason I don't delete it is because you can't delete evil. Not really. Also, it's a good badge of shame and a reminder to not do that again. So there's that.

Anyway, my point is that for whatever reason, I'm protective and secretive of the new book title right now. I'm sure I'll open up soon enough; just let me have this for a little while.

Last night, as I was going over some scenes towards the end of the book and discussing them with The Alpha Reader (who, despite the name, is not at all related to dominant male wolves in any fashion) and we were discussing the reactions to the end of the novel. I was presented with an analysis and interpretation of my own characters that I'd never even considered, stuff that hadn't even crossed my mind, but made a lot of sense when I heard it.

I think this is something that happens to writers eventually. At this point, confronted with an alternative character interpretation, you have two choices: you can tell the reader NO, YOU ARE WRONG, I WROTE THIS AND I AM THE AUTHORITY AND YOU ARE WRONG. I don't recommend that one, personally. Alternatively, you can feel a sort of weird modesty about the whole thing and wonder if maybe you're not really all that creative, and maybe this isn't really your story. Maybe you've tapped into another dimension or something and you're just recording the events of a world that exists independently of you. How does that sound for crazy? Maybe you didn't create anything in the whole book! Maybe this work of fiction really did happen in another universe and you were able to witness and record it thanks to the power of, shit, I dunno, psychic mind beams. Or something.

Do I have a point here? Yes. Yes, I do.

My point is that you don't own your characters. I mean, sure, in a legal sense, you can own them and make money off them and all kinds of shit like that. But when you craft a story, and this is key, when you show that story to another human being and say "here, read this thing that I wrote," at some level, you stop owning that story and those characters. Because now there are two versions of the story in existence. There's the version of the story that you wrote and there's the version of the story that the reader constructs through the act of reading and imagining the story on the page. And there's nothing about that version of the story that is any less real, any less important, any less valuable, than the version that you intended to write.

That doesn't give the reader the right to create their version of the story and sell it and make a million dollars off the idea that you gave them. But it also doesn't give you the right to tell the reader that their version of your story is wrong. It's real to them.

Frankly, if I were you, I'd be grateful that somebody gave enough of a damn to create their own version of a story that I wrote.

Maybe tomorrow, I'll talk about the weird experience of how it feels when the reader's version of the story is cooler and better than the version of the story you intended to write.

And people wonder why there's so much correlation between creativity and madness