Or at least reading into what you want to read? Either way, it’s interesting to me as a writer.
So this morning, I was listening to Amazon music on my car ride into the day job, as is usual. They have a function called ‘life soundtrack’ or something like that, curated (ie AI picked) music based on your prefs. So for me it’s a mix of mostly 80’s some 70’s and some 90’s music. I like it because some of it I’ve never ever heard, and it’s interesting. But ‘Hotel California’ came on… now I think almost everyone has heard that song. Classic Eagles, right? But here’s where I’m going with this… I had always ‘heard’ that it was about Heroin use. That it was all about trying to escape addiction.
I wasn’t sure if that was true, but that’s what I was told once… or read somewhere. So I assumed it was true. But I was curious. As a writer, I’ve run into times when a reader has assumed I was talking about something, that I never even though about when I was writing a story. I don’t think I’ve ever really had some kind of underlying ‘theme’ to anything I’ve written in terms of ‘this is what this is supposed to symbolize’ thought process. So I looked up Hotel California.. and guess what? According to the Eagles, it’s a song about weird characters in a hotel. That’s it. No great symbolism.
People will read into things, it’s our nature. We want things to ‘mean’ something. Sometimes we want it to be profound or life altering. But honestly, often it’s not. Sometimes… a story is just a story. There’s no great underlying secret message. It’s just a story. For me as a writer I find it rather amusing, as often I don’t really know where a story is going as a write. I just… write. Often very linearly. I see things happen in my mind, and I write them. Point A to Point B. I don’t outline much, outside of the rare occasion when I’ve had an idea for something I want to happen, dialogue, event, etc. and I’ll jot down a note. And that is just to make sure I include it somewhere, not when and what.
Yet I’ve had people tell me that something I’ve written means ‘X’ and I have no idea what ‘X’ is. I guess it’s the idea what people want stories to have personal meaning, so we connect them to things in our lives. Still… kind of interesting, if nothing else. Seeing (or reading) what you want to see is a very human thing,
