flummery | Lurkers Support Me In EMAIL!

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Lurkers Support Me In EMAIL!

Somewhere, recently, I had been reading about how a lot of professional authors were getting sort of irate about the Amazon reviews, and the fact that anyone could post, negative or positive, and apparently, these reviews really can have an impact on sales, these days.

I think, at the time, I sort of mulled that over, in a vague way, worrying that it could have impact on a relatively new writer, in detrimental ways, but how was it really different than word of mouth?

But, just yesterday,

elynross directed me to what appears to be a rebuttal review by Anne Rice of her latest book, Blood Canticle. I read it, and my jaw hit the table, and I had a whole lot of thoughts... one of which, initially, was that it had to be fake. And this is certainly still possible. But then I came across a link to an actual essay she'd written on her official website that... basically supported and repeated many of the same positions voiced in the rebuttal review. If that wasn't Anne Rice, someone was doing a pretty good job of channeling her.

The review can be found here, about halfway down the page.

The essay on her website can be found here.

She manages to hit upon, in these two essays, one hell of a lot of the very same arguments I see amateur (fan) writers using to justify themselves. Now, I'm not saying that writers should never explain what they were trying to achieve with their work, or stay silent when people are interested in having more information, but I am very much one of those people who go insane when a discussion of a story begins, only to have the author dive into the fray with all the reasons you didn't understand/shouldn't be criticizing her/are just plain mean! Goddamnit. The discussion is not for the author's benefit. It's not there to help the author become a better writer, or to encourage them, or boost their ego. It can do all those things, but that wasn't the point. It's there because people want to discuss what they read, or review what they read for other potential readers, or argue why a story worked, or didn't work for them. Just stay the hell out of it and let people have their discussion, unless they ask you a question directly.

Anne Rice hit every crap-ass argument I've ever seen thrown out on a list. In fact, her essays tell us that her very success has given her the leverage to engage in crappy writing all she wants, unfettered by the likes of cretinous editors, and other demons.

I just can't stop myself from commenting on her comments.

So, various sections, taken from the review, are quoted below, along with my reactions.
~~~~~

First off, let me say that this is addressed only to some of you, who have posted outrageously negative comments here, and not to all. You are interrogating this text from the wrong perspective. Indeed, you aren't even reading it. You are projecting your own limitations on it

We will leap past the "You're only stupid if you disagree with me" part of this text, and go to her statement that if you can't understand what she's saying, you're not reading the story correctly.

Somewhere along the line, I had a very good English/Writing teacher who spelled it out for us like this: "The message sent is the message received."

It doesn't matter what you meant to say. If you leave someone a note to meet you at McDonald's, and they head over to Burger King, you failed. You chose the wrong words. You used the words you chose poorly. No matter what you meant those words to say, or wanted them to say, they said something else, and you'd better suck it up, look at them, and discover what it was you did wrong so next time, you can get the message through. It's not the audience's job to read your mind, or know any other context than what is in front of them, right there, on the page.

Yes, there are sloppy readers, and people who skip over things. And then there are writers who just plain fail to get their point across, and those writers should stop accusing their audience of not paying attention. If your reader walks away from your communication with a message other than what you were trying to convey, more often than not, the fault lies with the writer.

Or, alternatively? Maybe we get it just fine, and still think it sucks. Stop expecting us to have a rapturous revelation if we squint at the words harder.

And this book is most certainly written -- every word of it -- by me. If and when I can't write a book on my own, you'll know about it. And no, I have no intention of allowing any editor ever to distort, cut, or otherwise mutilate sentences that I have edited and re-edited, and organized and polished myself. I fought a great battle to achieve a status where I did not have to put up with editors making demands on me, and I will never relinquish that status. For me, novel writing is a virtuoso performance. It is not a collaborative art.

The idea that your words are so perfect, that allowing an editor to comment, or make suggestions, or change them, would somehow besmirch the purity of your vision... it boggles me. You don't always have to take the advice, but you should consider the possibility that you're not as good as you think you are.

Back to the novel itself: the character who tells the tale is my Lestat. I was with him more closely than I have ever been in this novel; his voice was as powerful for me as I've ever heard it. I experienced break through after break through as I walked with him, moved with him, saw through his eyes. What I ask of Lestat, Lestat unfailingly gives.

Oh my god, it's the muses. The MUSES ARE SPEAKING THROUGH HER. I hate the muses. Who the fuck are these muses anyway? They never speak to *me*. Maybe these people with muses... shouldn't be quite so trusting of the voices they hear in their heads, you know?

Every word is in perfect place.

Bwahahahahahaha! Dude, there aren't even any *paragraph returns* in this damn review.

Now, if it doesn't appeal to you, fine. You don't enjoy it? Read somebody else. But your stupid arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing are slander. And you have used this site as if it were a public urinal to publish falsehood and lies. I'll never challenge your democratic freedom to do so, and yes, I'm answering you, but for what it's worth, be assured of the utter contempt I feel for you, especially those of you who post anonymously (and perhaps repeatedly?) and how glad I am that this book is the last one in a series that has invited your hateful and ugly responses.

You won't have ME to pick on any more! I'm leaving, and taking my toys with me!

There are readers out there and plenty of them who cherish the individuality of each of the chronicles which you so flippantly condemn. They can and do talk circles around you. And I am warmed by their response. Their letters, the papers they write in school, our face to face exchanges on the road -- these things sustain me when I read the utter trash that you post.

Lurkers Support Me In Email.

I just about died when I saw this. How many times have I seen this stated to bolster an argument? It doesn't matter what you all say, I *know* I'm right, because of the untold support I have that none of you are privy to! There's no way you could be right, when other people disagree with you! And also, they outnumber you! (And you're STUPID!)

Good Grief.

(Tomorrow: Mercedes Lackey single handedly changes to term to: Myste Sue)

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If you leave someone a note to meet you at McDonald's, and they head over to Burger King, you failed. You chose the wrong words. You used the words you chose poorly. No matter what you meant those words to say, or wanted them to say, they said something else, and you'd better suck it up, look at them, and discover what it was you did wrong so next time, you can get the message through.

I worship you. I throw flowers at your feet. Thank you thank you thank you.

I had to giggle when I saw this. Anne Rice! Gee, why is it only the really crappy writers who trot out these arguments?

Oh, wait...

Followed you here from

elynross's journal. Wonderful excoriation. :-)

-J

Flummery, I think I hurt something laughing.

Bwahahahahahaha! Dude, there aren't even any *paragraph returns* in this damn review.

Now if she had been skewering some completely off base fool I'd be yelling "Go Anne Go!", or if she'd been giving Harold Bloom a double barrel of his own snottery I'd be in heaven.

But this? This is priceless!

I am so sick of writers who think they are above needing editors...

Uh, sorry, ::waves:: editor here. Even editors need editors. If only to say, "um, idiot, learn to use the return key."

I can't imagine! *g*

It doesn't matter what you meant to say. If you leave someone a note to meet you at McDonald's, and they head over to Burger King, you failed. You chose the wrong words. You used the words you chose poorly. No matter what you meant those words to say, or wanted them to say, they said something else, and you'd better suck it up, look at them, and discover what it was you did wrong so next time, you can get the message through. It's not the audience's job to read your mind, or know any other context than what is in front of them, right there, on the page.

Yes, there are sloppy readers, and people who skip over things. And then there are writers who just plain fail to get their point across, and those writers should stop accusing their audience of not paying attention. If your reader walks away from your communication with a message other than what you were trying to convey, more often than not, the fault lies with the writer.

This is not a defence of Anne Rice, who's books I tried a long time ago and didn't like. But you know, I'm all about alternate readings are valid, but to say that if a reader walks away from a piece with an unanticipated interpretation to say that there is any fault at all strikes me as strange. Everybody walks away from a story with a different interpretation. I can't conceive of knowing each individual potential reader well enough to use language as a fool-proof medium for conveying exactly what you meant.

The example you give with the McDonalds/Burger King confusion boggles me. The way you write it seems to suggest to me that if you put the word's McDonalds on the note, but the addressee shows up at the Burger King, you are still somehow at fault for not communicating clearly. How could this possibly be the case? How far can you nail things down, in the end?

I think you can make a good attempt, but there will always be grey areas. In that respect there can be stories that you just don't get. I know there have been stories that I just didn't get at one point in my life, that I've come to love as my own point of view has changed. The reader brings something to the story too. And IMO that's not about fault, but about diversity.

The example you give with the McDonalds/Burger King confusion boggles me. The way you write it seems to suggest to me that if you put the word's McDonalds on the note, but the addressee shows up at the Burger King, you are still somehow at fault for not communicating clearly. How could this possibly be the case? How far can you nail things down, in the end?

If you write "Went for a burger, meet me there!" and expect the other person to just infer that you meant McDonald's, you failed. Maybe you never eat at any other burger joint, and you assumed that your friend knew that, so that therefore they should have known where to meet you. Doesn't matter -- you failed to communicate what you meant; they didn't fail to understand what you wrote.

yet another example of the "everything i needed to know i learned in fandom"...after Warner and your lit theory :-)

great essay, flummery! mind if i metablog you (it is fannish, right?)

Also wandered in from

elynross's journal, and I think you're absolutely wonderful. I read practically anything and everything, but when it came to "Interview With the Vampire" I didn't even make it through the first chapter. Since then, I've tried to read some of her other books, but had the same problem. It's not that I misunderstood them, it's just that I didn't LIKE them. That doesn't make me a bad person. Most of her arguments seem very immature, like a 5-year-old complaining about being picked on in the school yard. A 5-year-old would get sympathy from me, Anne Rice does not. She needs to grow up. On a side note, may I friend you?

If you write "Went for a burger, meet me there!" and expect the other person to just infer that you meant McDonald's, you failed.

Yes, and that would have made sense to me. But I take the wording 'If you leave someone a note to meet you at McDonald's' to mean that it said McDonalds in the note. If it had said 'a note to meet you at a burger joint' I wouldn't be confused, here. Which just goes to show that there are multiple reasonable interpretations of a text, I suppose.

eeee! sure, go for it! metablogged!

I think these passages cover what you're indicating:

Yes, there are sloppy readers, and people who skip over things. And then there are writers who just plain fail to get their point across, and those writers should stop accusing their audience of not paying attention. If your reader walks away from your communication with a message other than what you were trying to convey, more often than not, the fault lies with the writer.

and the end bit:

Or, alternatively? Maybe we get it just fine, and still think it sucks. Stop expecting us to have a rapturous revelation if we squint at the words harder.

As a general thing, yes, no single author can guarantee that every individual will understand her meaning. Addressed specifically to what AR was saying, and with the caveats that yes, there are sloppy readers, and allowing for the fact that sometimes it is the reader, I think that Thing 2's points are well-made. AR seems to be saying that if I, as a reader, don't love her work, that's because I don't get it, because it says exactly what she wanted it to, and therefore it's (presumably) crystal clear. Her implicit argument allows for no variety of interpretation at all. Either you get it, or you're wrong, because you're not reading it right, or you're filling it up with your own limitations. ie, "You're too limited to understand my perfect prose."

So, yes, there may always be gray areas, and stories that some people don't get -- but for an author to turn around and say that if you don't get it, there's something wrong with you is...beyond presumptuous. Which I think was Thing 2's primary point.

I wonder at what point you tried to read IwaV? Mind you, not that it would have made any difference, necessarily. *g* My thought is that when I first read it, it was a Brand New kind of thing, almost -- barring Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, whose vampire is almost more human. But it wasn't too long after AR caught on that there were more and better-written vampire books available.

I bogged down reading The Vampire Lestat, and never have gone back to read anything more (except the Witch books), but I did enjoy Interview -- mostly because I really liked the character of Louis, who fell by the wayside (probably because he didn't Walk with the author and whisper sweet nothings in her ear), and the idea of a sensual child vampire, which I hadn't run across before Interview came out. Also, Interview was much, much shorter than anything that came after.

I don't doubt that any one scene in a story can lead to a variety of interpretations. But I object to authors insisting that if you didn't take away from it what they wanted you to get, the fault was with you. There were two possibilities Rice seemed to be presenting 1) You weren't reading carefully enough and 2) if you had been, you would have understood, and you would have enjoyed it.

Well, I'm going to argue that a lot of the time, when that argument is put forth, 1) the author didn't make their case clearly enough and/or 2) the reader understood, and still thought it was poorly written, or unenjoyable.

I just read this via fandom_wank (the Rice 'review' I mean, not your post! *g*) and was both boggled and amused. And then I thought, should I post about this? And now I don't have to, because you said it better.

Just one addendum:

And you have used this site as if it were a public urinal to publish falsehood and lies

Um, yeah. Because that's what you do at a public urinal, I'm sure...

Mary, shaking her head

Whoo-iee nelly. She really is something, ain't she? :->

Who the fuck are these muses anyway? They never speak to *me*.

They never speak to me either!! Is there like a secret club or something?

And you have used this site as if it were a public urinal to publish falsehood and lies

Um, yeah. Because that's what you do at a public urinal, I'm sure...

Sure it is! You'll find "For a good time, dial 1-800-ANNERICE" on the walls of all your better public urinals. And that's not a good time at all.

I wandered over from metablog.

I'm trying to separate the issue from Anne Rice, which is hard. I can't, off the top of my head, think of anyone who writes as badly, but with as much presumption.

As you said at the beginning, it does trouble me that ANYONE can post ANYTHING at some of these sites--and as a corollary, some people being lemmings by nature, a lot of other people will pipe up and agree, who might never have been heard from otherwise. On a marginal book or movie or some other type of endeavor, someone like that, snowballing enough, could sink it.

But considering the alternatives, I'll take freedom of speech, even when some of the speakers are misguided or misinformed or just plain malicious.

And in this case? I think Anne used her own freedom of speech to pretty much prove the case against her.

I'm going to respond to both you and

flummery here, since presumably you'll both get an email notification.

There were two things I was responding to. One, the 'if I explicitly say McDonalds, and you still read Burger King, it is my (the author's) fault' (which is how what I took what you said to mean) doesn't make sense to me, even more so *because* it is at odds with the sloppy reader para quoted by

elynross.

Two:
It's not the audience's job to read your mind, or know any other context than what is in front of them, right there, on the page.

In the Netherlands most of us take at least two and usually three foreign languages in High School. It is stressed that you need to know something about the culture as a whole, and about the literary history to understand a French/German/English novel at all (and I very much find this to be true). Every author takes a certain context for granted. Like in science fiction authors don't have to explain 'it's the future and we're on another planet' anymore, it's a convention of the genre and readers now need very few cues to get that that's where something is going. A reader who is clueless about the genre conventions of science fiction is usually hopelessly lost when they pick up something like cyberpunk. Not everything is right there on the page. A lot of it is in the frame of reference of the reader *and* the author.

I think 'you may have been thinking it but it's only what made it onto the page that counts' is a great mantra while writing. But I don't think it covers everything about reading.

Relatedly, if I find something poorly written or unenjoyable that doesn't mean there is fault to be found with me *or* the author. I'm not behind the 'love me and despair' thing AR seems to be doing there, but even an attentive, intelligent reader brings their own expectations and desires to reading. I find discussions of *why* people admire this piece and hate that piece fascinating and delightful and fertile, but I still think that saying 'if I don't love it you didn't write it well enough' as presumptuous as the opposite.

You're being too literal. :) I think what she meant it, the theoretical "you" MEANT the note to clearly state "Meet me at McDonalds!" But you perhaps weren't paying attention and maybe you DID just say "Meet me for a burger!" assuming they knew you meant McDonalds because, I dunno, it's closest or you usually go there or whatever. Or...what if you did write "Meet me at McDonalds!" and they went to the wrong one? Or at the wrong time? And so forth.

Now, if you said "Meet me at the McDonalds on Main and MacArthur at noon today for a burger -- my treat -- I've got your number, but call me at (XXX) XXX-XXXX if you have to change plans, okay?" NOW you're communicating. (And obviously I've had to herd people around IRL, can't you tell? ;)

Snort! OK, I can't top that.

Mary, grinning

Love the rant.

There's also the issue that an editor (or a beta) can help identify those areas where people don't get the message the writer is trying to convey. And then the writer can choose to change the text to make the message more clear, and broaden the readership, or can stay with the original text, limiting the readership to those who grok her.

Sure, the reader has some responsibility, but as you say, so does the writer. A matching interpretation of the text requires effort on both parts. A writer can choose to limit their readership and be the next James Joyce, or can write for a broader audience and be the next Joan Collins.

Ms. Rice appears to want a huge and loving readership but isn't willing to make the effort to make herself more readable. Blaming the readers won't make her text any better written, and claiming that editors mutilate the text shows an absurd misunderstanding of what benefits an editor can bring to the process.

And in either event, ranting makes her look STUPID. ::rolls eyes::

(Ps -- want a laugh? read her other Amazon reviews.)

Excellent post. I saw the Anne Rice thing too where someone had linked to it, and god, the woman is insane.

Oh my god, it's the muses. The MUSES ARE SPEAKING THROUGH HER. I hate the muses. Who the fuck are these muses anyway? They never speak to *me*. Maybe these people with muses... shouldn't be quite so trusting of the voices they hear in their heads, you know?

I want this on a t-shirt.

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