#Death of an Author

[prokopetz]

Folks act like "maybe the author isn't the final authority about what their work means" is some wanky post-modern nonsense and not a simple recognition that a lot of authors are perfectly prepared to bullshit about their own work. Like, leaving big-name popular media aside, I have personally encountered authors being actively disingenuous about their own work for all of the following reasons:

A true answer wouldn't fit the image they've cultivated.

They've decided they like the explanation the readers/viewers have come up with better than what they actually had in mind.

Something that was originally intended as a standalone work ended up growing into a franchise or series, and now they're pretending that was the plan all along for some reason.

They don't want to admit that the bit you're asking about is genuinely just a plot hole.

The real answer gets into some shit they don't care to discuss, so they've prepared a cover story to explain away the parts they don't want to talk about.

Their politics have changed since they wrote it, but they don't want to acknowledge that, so they're constantly trying to re-interpret everything they've ever written to be perfectly consistent with whatever their positions are this week.

They wrote it decades ago and they honestly don't remember what they were thinking at the time, so they're just making shit up; sometimes they also don't remember what shit they made up the last time, so the answer is different every time they're asked.

The work in question is at least partly autobiographical and they can't tell the truth without confessing to a crime in the process.

Most of the good bits are plagiarised and they don't really understand it themselves.

They're lying to you on purpose, for evil reasons.

[throesofincreasingwonder]

"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).

Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.

[rs-hawk]

Working on my novel and couldn’t figure out why it felt so empty. I didn’t have any filler. It was all 100% plot. The characters only interacted when necessary. I didn’t prattle on about the scenery or how the birds sounded. I had all my fuller stuff that I loved saved in another file because I “didn’t need it”.

Y’all, I knew this existed in TV shows but it didn’t hit me until this that everything is being whittled down. We are so starving for filler that we snap up anything. I unload all mine on Tumblr or keep it in a massive Google Docs. It SUCKS.

Honestly? Death to plot necessity. Revive filler. Revive unnecessary interactions. Revive just vibing with characters sometimes. I don’t want to just consume the plot and I don’t want to just create the plot either.

[neil-gaiman]

I told my mother you had Tumblr and the absolute shock she was in that you are still alive and of somewhat sound mind was hilarious, would you be able to just tell her you are alive and not super old?

If not that's totally okay, ik you probably get a ton of these :)

I am sorry, but I fear I must disappoint you, for when you reach my advanced age it is difficult to remember whether you are alive or not.

[galaghiel]

Both Jack and Maddie stared at him, speechless. Silence blanketed the lab, everything but Danny’s strangled crying, his hand pressed over the muzzle as if to hide it. No- to hold it still, to still the dozen wicked barbs that were digging into his tongue, probably ripping it with each sob.

a little sketch of @liketolaugh-writes amazing one-shot fanfic that you can read here

[harbingerofsoup]

there’s death of the author and then there’s whatever the fuck is up with danny phantom

[angry-kid-with-no-money]

"Nora doesn't know anything about the things she writes about" "aftg is terrible queer rep" "the queer characters in aftg are so problematic"

Idk guys maybe the book series abt problematic ppl set in 2006 and written in the mid 2010s shouldn't be expected to hold up against scrutiny of what we consider to be moral and correct now, in 2024

Idk tho, idk

[tampire]

"Give me Coffee or give me Death"

[artemis-pendragon]

Imagine you're some religious guy who agrees to let an angel inhabit your body for a holy purpose and it all goes great except your wife thinks you're insane and threatens to take your daughter and leave but this is IMPORTANT so you let the angel in anyway. But then BUT THEN. it turns out the angel's mission is to pull Some Guy out of Hell and the fucking angel is gay and insane and rebels against Heaven because he wants to kiss this guy from literal Hell on the mouth so so so bad. Also many years later he does use your now thankfully empty human body (you got killed by Lucifer during the fight to stop the apocalypse btw) to fuck nasty with the guy he rescued because again, he's gay and insane. Every day Jimmy Novak wakes up

[frimleyblogger]

The Case Of The Faithful Heart

A shaggy dog tale with a surprising and rewarding twist at the end as Anthony Bathurst undertakes a private investigation in a piece of #CrimeFiction from Brian Flynn, reissued by @DeanStPress #amreading

In memoriam, Rupert Heath – the man who helped ignite my love for Golden Age Detective Fiction. Exegit monumentum aere perennius Requiescat in pacem. A review of The Case of the Faithful Heart by Brian Flynn – 230213 There are some fascinating themes in The Case of the Faithful Heart, originally published in 1939 and now reissued by Dean Street Press. It must be a tad disconcerting to open…

[katakaluptastrophy]

Periodically, I remember how absolutely fucked up the necromancers in TLT are meant to look. Like, necromancy does an absolute number on people physically.

Harrow is "rather small and feeble".

Necromantic Ianthe is "the starved shadow" of her non-necromantic twin.

Our first description of Palamedes is "a rangy, underfed young man" who is "gaunt".

Silas is "knife-faced...He had a necromancer build."

Ianthe parodies make-over scenes in House novels with "if the hero’s a necromancer it’ll be described like, ‘His frailty made his unearthly handsomeness all the more ephemeral'"

Jod acknowledges to Wake that even small children with aptitude would look odd to non-House eyes: "“I have access to any number of cute pictures of necromantic toddlers with their first bone. They don’t make for fat-cheeked roly-poly babies, but they’ve got a certain something."

In As Yet Unsent, Judith brags about her previous physical fitness: "I could run a kilometre in ten minutes, which was among the fastest for my adept group in the junior reserves." Which is about double the time you might expect for a physically fit woman her age.

In non-necromancer-friendly New Rho, Harrow's body is mistaken for a child's and has to be explained as a result of starvation and trauma to seem plausible: "Pyrrha explained without missing a beat that what with everything Nona had gone through she had been ill and still didn’t eat very much, which was why she was so knobbly and undergrown. The nice lady said that yes, many of the children had problems like that, but it was still hard to imagine Nona was anywhere over fourteen, wasn’t it?"

Tamsyn Muir's descriptions of the Canaan House gang on Tumblr back this up: "Judith is somewhat less completely scrawny than other necromancers on the cast, though she should be less built than Marta is", Palamedes is "seriously underfed" and "bony", Harrow is "scrawny".

And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head - I'm sure there's more.

Anyway, necromancers aren't slender in a conventionally attractive way, they're gaunt in a concerning way...and probably the only reason no one instantly clocked that Coronabeth wasn't a necromancer was because they all just thought it was par for the course that a Third House princess would have had a lot of plastic surgery flesh magic.

[kaggsy59]

"...bright ideas are so soon demolished..." #ReadIndies #deathofanauthor @BL_Publishing @medwardsbooks

I suppose it was inevitable that I would squeeze some Golden Age crime into #ReadIndies, especially as I believe British Library Publishing counts under our rules! I have a number of their books on the TBR, but my eye was caught by a recent arrival from the pen of E.C.R. Lorac – the intriguingly titled “Death of an Author“. Lorac’s a writer I’ve been so happy to discover via the various BL…

[fallenclan]

shits gettin REAL!!!! who is pumped. i know i am. enjoy the random ass starclan cat cameos that I crammed in here <3

finished this update JUST in time, but next week I'm gonna be even more busy so I guess we'll see!

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[millaniumcat]

"But we need to separate the art from the artist..."

NO. STOP.

"Separating the art from the artist" and "death of the author" does not mean what most people think it means, and i am so sick of people using this as an excuse for an artists horrible behaviour. Yes, i am looking at you, J.K Rowling and Till Lindemann (and so many more.)

"Death of the author" is a LITERARY THEORY that argues that the meaning of a piece of art is determined by the readers interpretation, not the authors intention. It is a TOOL used by LITERARY STUDIES to determine the meaning of a piece of art.

It is not a good argument in an everyday discussion about problematic authors. And it is certainly not an excuse for people to keep supporting artists (and art!) that are queerphobic, transphobic, anti-feminisitc, antisemitic and misogynistic.

And no, "separation of artist and art" is not a reason to ignore the problematic views of the author that are INHERENTLY INCOPORATED in the art.

DO NOT EVER use "death of the author" or "separate art from artist" as an excuse. It is not.

[kehlana-wolhamonao3]

This is how I look at the matter too. No art has been created by a perfect person, because there aren't any.

Also it always makes me think of Crawley and Aziraphale's discussion which composers could be listened to if the Heaven won. My life would be certainly poorer if I limited myself to books, films and music made only by people I admire.

Mr Gaiman,

What do you think about flawed people creating beautiful art? And especially when after you have enjoyed the art, if you later realised that people were hurt along the way…

thanks!

I think every piece of beautiful art in history has been created by flawed people. I don't think there's any other kind of people.

If you enjoyed and appreciated a piece of art, if it helped and changed you, then you don't have to give that up because the people who made it were flawed.

[filibusterfrog]

could i ask if you'd do a version of sapient undead sorcerer that isnt evil?