After the Epilogue
So John Green is rather notorious for harping on the point that an author has access to the exact same text a reader has, and that the author’s opinion on what happens to the characters after the novel is over — or indeed, what exists for the characters that goes unsaid in the books — is no more or less valid than the opinion of the reader.
I might be mischaracterizing his position on it a little bit, because I am verbose and also I’ve been watching economics lectures all day, so my brain is a little wibbly. I suppose it would be better to say what he always says in answers to FAQs, which is “Books belong to their readers.”
To an extent, I agree with that. When I readHarry Potter, for instance, I see the same Harry, Ron, and Hermione that I’ve been seeing in my head since I was nine years old. Or when I read something like John Green’sLooking for Alaska, it never fails that the characters always look the exact same to me. It’s a little unsettling to see other readers’ interpretations of these characters, because they’re quite different from the people running around in my head acting out the book.
But also to an extent I disagree. The writer has a privileged position over the reader. Authorial intent isn’t the end-all be-all of novels. There’s a saying that goes something like if you feel pain, even if the doctor can’t find any reason for that pain to be there, it’s real to you. Experience is completely relative, and if I readHarry Potteras a manifesto for promoting witchcraft and Satanism, then by God that’s what I got out of it, and no amount of wheedling from the author can bring that back.
But I think the writer is in a position where he or she can always tell readers,Well, this was howIsaw it.It brings to light different things. When I create my own characters, I know plenty of backstory that never makes it into the final draft, but it informs why I write the characters in a certain way. (There’s a poor fellow in my series who has quite a tortured past and present, but of course, he never really brings it up because he’d rather not worry his friends. Also it’s not entirely relevant to the story I’m telling.)
Then again, that could just be the sort of writer I am. I need to know everything. I have piles and piles (well, files and files) of notes on detailed histories and character backstories and family trees and so on and so forth, but does the reader need to know all that? No, of course not. In the same way that we don’t need to know that Minerva McGonagall’s wand is made of fir with a core of dragon heartstring, or that Albus Dumbledore had a crush on Gellert Grindelwald, or whatever — J.K. Rowling is just lucky enough that her fans find this extra information every bit as interesting as her stories.
Perhaps this is just a function of writing genre fiction. I’m not so good at writing, er, “literary” or “contemporary” or whatever you want to call it, so I’ve never attempted to write anything on the scale of my roughly 280,000 words of magical pirate stories. But my experience with that has proven to be a very intimate relationship with the text, the characters, and the story. Nobody else has that relationship, and it does, I think, give me insight.
