What do you think of people "interpreting" fiction?

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When you interpret what’s on TV, you are frequently “interpreting fiction.”

As an artist (visual) one of the purposes of my work is to make connections with an audience. I expect them to be active participants not just passive observers. When I read a story, the very act of my reading it makes me an active participant in the narrative. Every story is unique to the individual who experiences it yet it is also a shared experience with others who experience it.. That is the unique power of art.

I'm an English major and all I do is interpret fiction.

There's a lot more ways to interpret fiction than trying to "guess" the author's intention. You can analyze it in terms of what it says about the culture that produced it, the way the piece portrays certain types of people, ect.

Art is meant to be analyzed and interpreted. Art isn't science. Art is subjective and there are no correct or incorrect answers. If you're worried about someone misinterpreting a story you write, then I would suggest not writing anything at all.

My friend the abstract sculptor will never say what he sees in a piece. He sells a lot more if he leaves it up to the customers. Neither of us care one whit what they think. I'm amazed that people ever pay to hear such opinions. If the experience of looking at his stuff worked as words, he'd be an author.

Sometimes (many times) you really just want a good story.

Underlying messages are mainly good imo for keeping stories tight and going in one direction. If you have no idea what you want to write about at all, things can get a little messy.

(I also sucked at that in English class, unfortunately...)

In Renaissance Italy, one of the Dukes heard that another courtier had died. "I wonder what he meant by that" was his immediate response.

It annoys me too that some people just have to interpret fiction and look for hidden meaning.

I take no interest in interpreting any book, movie etc, I am only interested in the actual story. Interpretations lessen and ruin the joy of a good story for me.
That crap was something I really hated about Norwegian and English class.

This reminds me of that joke about blue curtains.

I used to write stories when I was younger, and I would have hated it of anyone tried to "interpret" them. They were about exactly what the story was. I used to always bubble over with story ideas and took great delight in writing them.

I love and have always loved fiction. Reading and watching enjoyable/ entertaining / exciting / funny stories give me so much. I think and feel and dream so much when I'm taken with it. That has value to me and I can't even begin to understand why anyone would want to ruin the fun and lessen something so great.

To be fair, the "death of the author" school of thought is common in literary theory nowadays. Professors have described it as the idea that once a work is published, it's public domain. The author can't dictate what it means.

There are times when fans simply recoil at something an author has suggested... for example, almost all Harry Potter fans refuse to believe that The Cursed Child is "canon", given that the common interpretations of the Harry Potter characters seem at odds with how they're portrayed in the play.

The only thing that makes a story fun is interpreting it. Otherwise it has no meaning.

To find meaning, one decodes the letters and compares them to a known language. Interpretation takes what comes from decoding, and feeds in a private bias.

Would the concepts discussing 'Metafiction' (that also mentions postmodern-related concepts) be of interest? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafiction

Thanks for informing us all that "you cant read a book written in Spanish unless you know how to read Spanish".

That's quite newsworthy.

But besides that do you have an actual point to make?

Is your point that nothing is fun as written?

I get where you're coming from, but, to me, the opportunity to analyze fiction is like solving a big puzzle and getting to be creative.

I get that it's not everyone's bag (and that's totally fine), but I don't get the folks who seem positively offended by us nerd-types interpreting fiction.

Just going to throw out there that there are books written in such a way that you’re effectively required to analyse them to make any sense of them at all.
Burroughs, PK Dick, Dostoyevsky, Eco & Rushdie all spring to mind.

Sometimes a dead dog, is nothing more than a dead dog (not foreshadowing).