#WritersCoffeeClub Nov 12th.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

#WritersCoffeeClub Nov 12th. How can writers ensure the focus is on the work and not the writer?

I dunno—by not over-exposing your personal foibles in the work? Remember you're writing for other people, not yourself?

Seriously, once the work is published you LOSE ALL CONTROL OVER HOW IT IS RECEIVED. And at least 25% of your readers will draw not simply the wrong conclusions but the exact opposite of what you intended. (Humans are *terrible* at literary comprehension.) So get used to it.

[steveclough@metalhead.club]

@cstross Very true - that your work is public once published, and it stands on its own.

Someone somewhere will interpret it completely wrongly. Always.

[cppguy@infosec.space]

@SteveClough @cstross

I write nothing more creative than documentation for the software I produce, but people misunderstand that, too.

The experience of people misunderstanding my docs, or simply failing to read them, was one of the things that turned me away from evangelicalism. (I bet you didn't see that coming.) I wasn't using parables to hint at ineffable spiritual truths in the face of religious persecution: I was just explaining how software worked, how to see its current state, and how to configure and maintain systems. People who were paid to read and understand this material would not or could not do so: their repeated questions made it obvious. Within a very few years, instead of reading TFM, people developed folk stories of commands they could type that usually did something that could be mistaken for success. They veered constantly off-course, and I kept having to drag them back. They consulted each other, rather than the docs, and developed their own mythology about how the software worked. They intuitively felt they knew the software better than I did, because my approach to problem-solving was careful and methodical but they knew a golden shortcut.

If concrete, human-level explanations, written out literally, landed so badly, there's no chance that people will have remembered the figurative and unfathomable teachings of Jesus seventy years after his death, written them down accurately and fully, and built from them a useful picture of worlds seen and unseen and the will of God. I'm sorry; it just doesn't ring true.