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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31320
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31320
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Stories create experiences. Stories that are heavy on setting create an experience of that setting. People sometimes simply receive an experience for what it is. We are experience junkies. Stories are one of the ways that we satisfy our need for experiences. They help keep us sane.

People often draw conclusions from their experiences. Sometimes these are tacit conclusions. That is, they affect how we think and act, but we don't boil them down to an aphorism or a conclusion. Sometimes we do articulate our conclusions.

You cannot force a reader to draw a conclusion from your story, still less to articulate one. They may simply receive the experience as they might receive the experience of walking in the woods or eating ice cream. They may tacitly form a conclusion without articulating it. In particular, they may not draw any conclusion from your story alone. Sometimes it takes many repetitions of an experience before any conclusion is formed -- something advertizing people are well aware of.

You also cannot force the reader to draw the same conclusion as you do from your story. Different people draw different conclusions from identical experiences, if for no other reason than that they interpret them in the context of their other experiences and no two people have the same experiences.

But there is also the issue of confirmation bias. Whatever our views are on a subject, we go through life looking for evidence to confirm that view. We see evidence that supports our position, are blind to evidence that undermines it, and interpret our experiences as evidence favorable to our positions. Different people see different things in the same experience, at least in part because they are looking for different things. People will form different opinions on what your story "means" based on what they want it to mean. For evidence of this, you have only to look at the conflicting readings that book reviewers and literary critics have of major works.

But if you cannot force your conclusions on the reader, you can at least work to shape their experience in such a way that it favors the conclusion you want them to draw. One of the most basic techniques for doing this it to engage the reader's sympathy for a character before you reveal something about them which might make the reader hate them if you led with it. Another is essentially the opposite, to make the reader hate them initially before showing redeeming features that make the reader question their first judgement. ("Luke, I am your Father!")

But you don't get to show a truth to the reader directly in a story. The best you can do is to give them an experience that is true and hope that they reach the truth for themselves. Of course, you could just write an essay to state your truth didactically. But there is a reason that we write stories: the truths that people find for themselves through experience are much more firmly held because they are not someone else's truths, but their own.

Original score: 3