Charlie Stross
#WritersCoffeeClub 12/15 Do some readers over-interpret your work or get messages you weren't sending?
I can guarantee that about 25% of your readers of, well, ANYTHING, will not merely mis-read what you wrote, but get any message exactly backwards and upside down (bonus points: in mirror writing too).
If you want to say something in a novel you need to say it at least three times before 75% of your readers notice it (and then another 25% will—rightly—acuse you of gratuitous repetition.)
Charlie Stross
@MattMerk He's quite right, but if I repeat myself too much in a manuscript my agent yells at me! (She's not one of the stupid ones.) And if it goes through to publication like that, the non-stupid readers proceed to yell at me in reader reviews. You can't win.
Matthew Merkovich
@cstross LOL! I’m laughing because I had a college English professor once say (tongue firmly in cheek—but was it really?) that people are stupid, and you have to repeat whatever you are trying to say multiple times. His number was five.
Jernej Simončič �
@cstross I want to make a movie so painfully obvious in its satire that everyone who understands it lives in perpetual psychological torment inflicted on them by all the people who don't.
— Paul Verhoeven on Starship Troopers movie
Tucker McKinnon :teapot:
@cstross ahh, and Mike "I have a horror of being obvious" Ford wrote explicitly for that last 25% (or less). Makes sense.
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