(What I Thought Was) My Greatest Fear

My greatest fear is not being understood. I scream my throat raw arguing my points, cutting anyone off who doesn’t believe me. I hate the early drafts that don’t perfectly convey what they should. I scroll through comment sections on movie scenes and feel nauseous when people don’t understand why they were created, or at least why I think they were. The most fearsome: I watch people analyse books and fear that the author wrote the book with a fundamental difference in opinion to these reviewers, but their intention didn’t translate. I am afraid of this because it could very easily happen to me.

What if people don’t see the hope in my story? If they dismiss the protagonist’s flaws without witnessing her redemption? If they think the leads serve each other no real purpose? These thoughts are like large, bitter pills.

Characters hook your reader in, they become invested in their goals and how they pursue them, and it then becomes your responsibility to have their resolution tie in with your intentions, or otherwise contrast them to highlight them. It is up to you how much you tell them. Spoon-feeding approaches have their pros and cons, but I find them difficult to avoid as they eliminate most of the misunderstandings. Unfortunately, however clear I decide to make my intentions, everyone interprets art in their own way.

I have recently finished reading the book ‘A Certain Hunger’ by Chelsea G Summers. Feeling a connection to her perspective, I read her interview with Antonia Charlesworth of Big Issue North and was drawn to this quote: “The thing about writing is that writing always fails. No matter what you do, people are going to read your work in ways that you did not intend.”

I believe that she is correct. Returning to my metaphor, I still need to swallow that pill. Summers was asked about similar confusion among readers of Bret Easton Ellis’ ‘American Psycho’, as their unconventional protagonists have led to confusion about the intentions of their creators. However, killers such as Patrick Bateman and Dorothy Daniels are not the only types of characters that confound readers. I am writing about an angry teenage girl, a simple archetype that faces similar challenges. In the novel, she makes mistakes that would be deplorable even without the extra frustration that teenage girls seem to elicit in audiences. I am bound to have as difficult a time getting people to understand my story as Summers and Easton Ellis.

With this novel, I intend to avoid mistakes I believe writers of YA novels make with their young protagonists. This comes with a fear of comparison. If I fail to be as clear as possible, I could be compared to authors I spend time striving to differ from. On the other hand, if I am as clear as possible, I lose all the valuable nuance that I believe I should have as an author. It is this dilemma that forces me to confront what I value as a writer and accept the consequences.

Even considering the anxious, rambling tone of this piece, there is only so far I am willing to go to make myself understood. The message of this post is not ‘spoon-feed your readers’, rather ‘it is not the end of the world if someone doesn’t read the story in the way you intended them to.’

For the sake of the clarity I always seek, I will rephrase the message again: if people fail to understand the message behind my book they will write me off before truly hearing me out, a concept I struggle to cope with. However, I have to do so.

Let me tell you again: tell your story. Do not lose sleep over others’ comprehension.

If you find yourself relating to this piece, please persevere. While it is true that we are responsible for clarity and integrity in our writing, we cannot control how our work is interpreted. The human mind is complex, perception is elusive, and language is ever-shifting. We must simply continue doing what we do best: telling stories.