Reading Sideways & Without Bias ~ The Reading Craft #1
Speculative fiction doesn’t always follow the rules—but maybe that’s the point. In this series, we’ll explore how to read stories on their own terms, not just through our personal expectations.
We have all read a story that left us clueless. We may have encountered seemingly clunky lines, “poor” grammar, flat characters, perhaps plot events that make no sense. Maybe we thought: that's bad writing.
What if it's not?
What if the author had an intention and we simply missed the point?
Let’s be honest: we are all prejudiced. We have tastes, habits, cultural expectations, things we look for as readers that prescribe (consciously or not) how a story—and all of its elements—should be presented. We come in with a lot of expectations around pacing, plot, character development, twists, and even what a “satisfying” ending should look like.
It is a common thing, to be biased… but it is also restrictive. We may end up reading books that follow a prescriptive recipe for storytelling… and when a book doesn’t fit that mold, we want to shoehorn it into what we expect.
Yet by doing so, we risk missing a crucial detail: fiction doesn’t have to follow any rules… least of all, rules imposed (subjectively!) by our preference as an individual reader. Especially in speculative fiction, where the only limit is imagination, an author might deliberately challenge form, voice, or structure to present a theme or idea we haven’t even considered before.
Speculative fiction is a playground for breaking rules—but that also implies that we, as readers, need to make an conscious effort to keep our biases in check to read a book without judging it… at least, not until we have finished and considered its meaning.
Let me show you some examples…
Here are three oddities, each belonging to a different book which I will name afterwards—once we dive into the discussion—not to bias you.
Here is the first example:
He knew, too, about the AM station that played the top-ten-type tunes on and on plus an enormous amount of DJ chatter in between, which sometimes was not chatter, in a sense. If that station had been tuned to, and the racket of it filled your car, anyone casually overhearing it would hear a conventional pop music station and typical boring DJ talk, and either not hang around at all or flash on in any way to the fact that the so-called DJ suddenly, in exactly the same muted chatty style of voice [...]
This is the second one:
"The Ciiiity!.... That's where you're heading [...] But, Silent Man, there's no way to get to the City. If you wanted to go to the Clay Meadow, say, that's no problem: go past the stones, [...] through the kook village, and the Clay Meadow will be right there. [...] You should've told me right away that you want to go to the Reeds. [...] But I can make it to the Anthills. I'll make it there myself, and I'll take you there, too. [...] But you aren't going to the Anthills. [...] You're going to the Reeds. But I can't go to the Reeds, I won't make it"
And here is the third one:
Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been [...]
Look at them closer. Strange syntax (borderline incorrect); meandering passages, seemingly non-sensical topics on each of them.
Is that bad writing? Or is there an authorial purpose behind them?
Let me tease you a bit more. These three books are traditionally published and written by renown authors; two have won renown, prestigious awards and one was banned for over two decades. Two are consider classic Masterpieces, one is a modern masterpiece that’s now deemed paramount within its niche genre.
One you know all of that, perhaps you stopped flinching.
Maybe even wondered: how did they get away with it? After all, there is so much “wrong” in these texts—and yes, I’m using the quotes intentionally, because there is nothing wrong in those texts. They just happen to subvert every piece of writing advice you may have heard of. Even the things we, as readers, learnt to consider "proper or quality writing."
What validates these sentences is something we, as readers, often fail to consider: authorial intention.
The author is not dead…
—but while that’s a conversation for another essay, we still need to consider the fact that the author’s intention does have a lasting impact in their own work1.
What if we assume that the writer penned those words intentionally? What if we consider the writing style may be a type of literary show-don't-tell?
The authorial intention—the reason as to why an author chose to write in one specific way at a specific point in their story—cannot be denied. Especially within literary-adjacent genres.
If we manage to keep those biases in check and to actively ponder why the author wrote in that strange way… well, we may discover the book is, objectively, a technical masterpiece. We may, subjectively, hate it—but recognising the difference between both of those statements (and the value that brings to us as reader and also as writers) is fundamental.
Because I’m not teasing you when I say that those three excerpts were written with a very specific meaning in mind.
Let me tell you some details:
The first excerpt is from A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick (PKD)—a controversial book following an undercover narcotics officer that just fell onto the vice. Most of the "meandering" dialogue or thoughts are actually reflecting the scattered and inconsistent mind-state of someone who's high. The meandering text is just a way of making the reader experience what it’s like. There is a purpose and a theme—and it gets far more impactful when you read PKD’s Endnotes.
The second excerpt is from Snail on the Slope by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. This is a much-banned absurdist book criticising how illogical bureaucracy can by, and how easy it's to accept a twisted reality simply because it is easier. The dialogue didn't make sense because the lack of sense was part of the allegory… and the book had to be written in a pretty abstract way in hopes of getting past the censors. I did a whole episode on it:
The last excerpt is from Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer and, those specific words are found carved in a wall. Within the book, this is not written by a human, but by an eldritch entity who has quite a strange purpose to do so… one even the protagonist has trouble understanding.
Knowing that, the pattern becomes clear: in each of these cases, the authors had plot-related reasons to go against the "rules of proper writing" to craft an experience that went beyond a sequence of events. PKD sought to immerse readers in the illogical, wasted stated of mind of a drug-addict, the Strugatsky sought to make a political critique and confuse the censors, and VenderMeer was trying to write as a non-human for plot reasons I won’t spoil.
Yet some readers are too eager to label this "bad writing" when, in reality, is just the fabled show-don't-tell advice enacted through literary tricks—namely, using grammar and sentence structure to implicitly showcase something without actually telling the reader about it.
So… how do we discover the authorial intention?
How can we, as readers, approach a text with a mind open enough as to cast away judgement and let the story takes us wherever it wants? How can we keep our biases on check until after we’ve finished the story?
That is exactly what my series, The Reading Craft, is all about.
There are a few things that I want to cover, but most of all, this series will be about detecting those “knee-jerk reactions” we have as readers so that we can approach original, rule-breaking stories with an open mind.
For example, we will investigate:
Why do we assume certain things are “bad writing”?
How much of our judgment is rooted in expectations from other genres or conventional storytelling?
How can we sharpen our critical thinking to respect the craft behind the weird?
How can we get better at detecting authorial intention?
How the cumbersome “relatability” plays against us when approaching these works.
But the investigation will be, as usual, practical. I want to tackle close readings of challenging or misread works, share exercises or reflective prompts, and—if there is quorum for that—open up for a readalong or discussion on how we struggle on putting our preferences aside (including what works and doesn’t work for each of us).
Expect weird, expect uncomfortable, expect strangeness.
But most importantly, expect a challenge.
Until next one!
~Livia
This is a reference to "The Death of the Author" (French: La mort de l'auteur): a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980). I am particularly against it, since I believe that authorial intention (and the author’s background) should be taken into account when reading a book.