Second guessing JKR

[jsmgleaner]

No: HPFGUIDX 75635

"Geoff Bannister" <gbannister10 at a...> wrote:

Have readers ever written an email or a 
> letter or said something to find that the reader or hearer has put a 
> totally different slant on what was meant? Maybe JKR wrote down the 
> words of the prophecy with her own specific line of thought in mind 
> without stopping to consider how the readers might choose to see a 
> different meaning – or did she consider every word thinking "Aha! 
> This'll get `em going. He, he". This is perhaps a trap of critical 
> analysis that we assume that the writer has paralleled our line of 
> thought and has indeed inserted material which can be analysed in 
> umpteen ways; or perhaps we are tripping ourselves up in our own 
> eagerness to "unfog the future".

me (jsmgleaner):

I think that this is the central problem/opportunity in writing: the writer=
 does not 
have ultimate control over the readers' responses.  One way a writer can tr=
y to 
get across her intentions is to vet the work to good readers and rewrite ba=
sed 
on the critiques.  But once it's out there, published, the writer is not in=
 control 
of reception.  To put another spin on it, many creative writers find this a=
spect 
useful since readers, especially analytical ones, will find great things in=
 their 
works that they had not intended, making their own writing strange and 
exciting again.

As for JKR, I think that our reception in this group is a product of her bo=
oks, 
her way of sprinkling clues into a narrative that spans so many books (and =

now so many years).  As each new book comes out, it turns out how many 
clues were set in earlier books; this formula for writing will cause eager =
fans to 
look for clues even if the evidence is thin (or perhaps most especially whe=
n it 
is thin; what a coup to be correct then!). 

--jsmgleaner