Terry here with our question of the week: Have readers ever interpreted your message differently than you expected?
For readers to interpret a “message” means I have to have an intended message. I usually have some kind of social issue at the heart of my novels. In the past that’s included corrupt or incompetent cops, treatment of veterans in the U.S., family abuse, gambling addiction, dog fighting, women’s reproductive rights, ecological carelessness, guns rights, and the desperation that comes from financial insecurity.
I don’t always have a message to impart. It’s more an exploration of the issues and how people deal with them.
But that exploration can sometimes lead readers to think I’m leaning heavily one way or another.
For example, in my novel The Troubling Death of Maddy Benson, reproductive rights were at the heart of the novel. I went to great pains to present positions other than my own and to not make anyone the “bad guy.” And yet, I had a couple of readers who were huffy in their reviews. One said that in the novel all the people in favor of abortion were good people and those in opposition were bad people. Yet other readers praised the novel for being fair to those with differing opinions. I suppose the answer is more in the mind of the reader than in the book I wrote.
My novel A Reckoning in the Back Country dealt with the difficult and horrendous subject of dog fighting. I knew early in writing the series that eventually I’d have to tackle the subject because you can’t write about rural Texas and pretend illegal dog fighting doesn’t exist. I did a lot of research, and found some interesting attitudes that I didn’t expect. In particular, that some people who were engaged in what is loosely called the “sport” loved their dogs and would pull them out of a fight if they felt the dogs were being too injured. Not that it made the fighting any more palatable to me, but it was interesting. I also found that the biggest reason law enforcement shies away from pursuing legal recourse against those who participate is that dog fighting advocates don’t hesitate to kill law officers. I read about two officers who risked their lives by going undercover to investigate a dog-fighting ring.
These were matters that made the book more important to me. Yet I had some readers who simply refused to read the book because of the subject matter. I can’t fault anyone for not wanting to plunge into that world, but I find it interesting that readers don’t have a problem reading about pretty much any other subject concerning murder, but they draw the line at dog fighting.
My last example is an odd one from my latest book, The Curious Poisoning of Jewel Barnes. Two things stand out. In a couple of professional reviews, the reviewers complained that there were too many characters. The idea from my point of view was to present a big family that had a lot of issues among them (based on my extended family). I thought I had done a decent job of highlighting the important characters and using the others as background. The reviewers were not happy. Except that many of my readers told me they loved reading about the extended family. When I asked if they thought there were too many characters introduced, they were puzzled and said they had no trouble keeping them straight. So. Go figure.
But there was another aspect of this book that was either skipped over by readers, or I didn’t do a good job of presenting. I wanted to present a real and serious dilemma, in which Craddock has to decide between making sure justice is done on the one hand, and saving the lives of people who are threatened if he does so on the other. Not one reader has mentioned that pivotal moment to me. I expected it to be an important part of what readers took away. The book is published and there’s nothing to be done about it, but I’m curious why the message seems not to have resonated.
Other than those few examples, I think most readers “get” what I’m writing. At least I hope so.
