On Writing: Partners

I'm heading to Philadelphia next weekend to do a workshop for the Valley Forge RWA.  It has me thinking about writing this week.

What does a writer want you to feel when you read their book?  What do they want you to take away from a story?  What was their point of telling that story?

If you've ever sat through an English Lit class, you've been asked questions like this.  And those questions have validity.  The author always had a point in telling the story.  Sometimes it's blatant and as a reader you know their take away. Good triumphs over evil.  Love wins out.  But sometimes their point is more obscure.  Maybe Love Wins Out is the point. But maybe there's something smaller and less tangible to the reader...something that drove the author to tell that story. 

When I wrote Briar Hill Road, Love Wins Out is easily my big theme...it's the theme that truly works for any book I've written.  But Briar Hill Road was also an exploration of what makes a family (most of my books are that, too).  Yet even more than that, for me as the writer, it was a cathartic book.  It was my way of saying goodbye to my mother-in-law.  

Here's the thing...you don't need to know that to read the book.  When I finish a book, when I've said what I wanted to say in it, I let it go.  My ownership of that story is done.  I hand it over to you...the reader.  And maybe you'll see the same thing in it that I saw as I wrote it.  Maybe you'll see that love always wins out.  Maybe you'll recognize that family isn't always born...sometimes it's discovered.  Maybe you'll realize, if only for a moment, that life is a journey and there are ups and downs.  Maybe you'll even see shades of my mother-in-law in Kathleen and think, I would have loved to be this character's friend.  (Trust me, you would have.)

Writing and reading...they are a codependent partnership.  I tell a story and then I set it free.  You get to pick it up and (hopefully) when you read it, you bring your own point-of-view, your own history to the story and you see it through a different lens than I wrote it.  You see it through your own personal lens.  Maybe you take away something I never imagined from it. And that's okay.  That's my hope.  That is my intent.  

Writer and reader are partners.  You and me...we're a team!

Holly

PS It's a sales palooza week.  (Publishers just send me notices...I have no control most of the time and just like to pass them on.)

Hold Her Heart
Just One Thing
Everything But...series
Fairly Human