Quoty (spoiler-free)
Since I can't actually read Deathly Hallows just at the moment (this whole thing where I have to "work" for eight hours a day? totally overrated) I am reading about Deathly Hallows.
Before you get your knickers in a twist, let me just state that I am, counter to my usual policy, avoiding all spoilers like the plague. I am, however, having fun reading the pre-book exchanges between Pat Rothfuss and Orson Scott Card on Beliefnet (starts here, links to the next installment are confusingly located at the top rather than the bottom of the page). I think both of them have some solid theories and both of them are out to lunch in places, but it's all good reading. My favorite bit, though, is mostly unrelated to the Potter craze and comes from Card's initial piece on the End of Harry:
The Storyteller’s Compact
I, the author, will bring you into a world which I made up, so that everything that happens is not true. You will pour your emotions into the characters and situations that I create, and spend hours and hours reading it.
In return, I promise that even though nothing is true, everything will feel truthful - events will make a kind of moral and logical sense in a way that the real world rarely does. Characters’ decisions will feel truthful given what I have told you about them. I will follow the rules I set up in the story.
By the end, the memories that you, the reader, have allowed me to insert into your mind will feel good to you. Not necessarily happy or pleasant, but Good. As the godlike creator of a fictional world, I will prove myself to be a god who loves Good and ennobles it in my fiction.
(Please keep in mind that I called this “The Storyteller’s Compact.” There is another one, called “The Literary Compact,” and it goes like this:
(I, the author, will provide you with words. The way the words are arranged will impress you no end with my skill at word-arranging. I will give you many opportunities to feel very smart about how you catch all the references I have made to other literature, and how you decode all the symbols and solve all the puzzles I have created for you. At the end of the words, you will be almost as impressed with yourself for having read them as you are impressed with me for having arranged them so artfully, and in return you will honor me with prizes and grants and tenured positions.)
My thoughts on the above:
1. Hee. Apparently I'm not the only one whose love for parenthesis is occasionally a tad excessive.
2. I love the Literary Compact and what it implies about both the readers and the writers of mainstream literary fiction. Card is so good at snarking the highbrows.
Before you get your knickers in a twist, let me just state that I am, counter to my usual policy, avoiding all spoilers like the plague. I am, however, having fun reading the pre-book exchanges between Pat Rothfuss and Orson Scott Card on Beliefnet (starts here, links to the next installment are confusingly located at the top rather than the bottom of the page). I think both of them have some solid theories and both of them are out to lunch in places, but it's all good reading. My favorite bit, though, is mostly unrelated to the Potter craze and comes from Card's initial piece on the End of Harry:
The Storyteller’s Compact
I, the author, will bring you into a world which I made up, so that everything that happens is not true. You will pour your emotions into the characters and situations that I create, and spend hours and hours reading it.
In return, I promise that even though nothing is true, everything will feel truthful - events will make a kind of moral and logical sense in a way that the real world rarely does. Characters’ decisions will feel truthful given what I have told you about them. I will follow the rules I set up in the story.
By the end, the memories that you, the reader, have allowed me to insert into your mind will feel good to you. Not necessarily happy or pleasant, but Good. As the godlike creator of a fictional world, I will prove myself to be a god who loves Good and ennobles it in my fiction.
(Please keep in mind that I called this “The Storyteller’s Compact.” There is another one, called “The Literary Compact,” and it goes like this:
(I, the author, will provide you with words. The way the words are arranged will impress you no end with my skill at word-arranging. I will give you many opportunities to feel very smart about how you catch all the references I have made to other literature, and how you decode all the symbols and solve all the puzzles I have created for you. At the end of the words, you will be almost as impressed with yourself for having read them as you are impressed with me for having arranged them so artfully, and in return you will honor me with prizes and grants and tenured positions.)
My thoughts on the above:
1. Hee. Apparently I'm not the only one whose love for parenthesis is occasionally a tad excessive.
2. I love the Literary Compact and what it implies about both the readers and the writers of mainstream literary fiction. Card is so good at snarking the highbrows.