These are the same people who mix the handful of exposition you give them with the story you’re telling, transform it into a detailed real-time color 3D movie in their heads, and credit the whole thing to you.
If they take a liking to a character, they can spin an entire human personality out of four facts and a couple of reaction shots, and experience that thing they create as a person that they know.
You rely on them. Storytelling wouldn’t work if the audience wasn’t constantly filling in the details from the hints that you provide. Most of them are surprisingly good at it.
Meanwhile: did you invent storytelling? Narrative tropes and techniques? The real-sounding but thoroughly artificial conventions of dialogue? The props and backdrops of your genres? We’re all proud of our pottery, but none of us invented clay.
Every reader or viewer builds a slightly different experience from the materials you give them. It’s not unjust for them to feel a sense of connection with it, and their doing so takes nothing away from you.
It’s an unavoidable consequence of their engagement with your work, so consider rejoicing, because you can’t make it stop happening except by becoming a worse or at least
less accessible writer.
less accessible writer.
