Reading into it

I was listening to The Dragon Page podcast last night in which John Scalzi (an author I have never heard of before though his books look interesting) was interviewed. I'm going to paraphrase here, but if you listen to the original podcast you can hear his exact words. Basically Scalzi said that after he wrote a certain book, fans asked him why he did this and why he did that. Scalzi said in the podcast that there really was no reason, "I was lazy and that's the way I decided to do it." But that's not what he told fans because he was working on a sequel. He told fans something to the effect of "ah, yes, there's a reason for that..." and then he wrote in the reason to the sequel. And now when people ask him about reasons for things in the sequel, he says "oh, really?" with an open ear, for the readers are unknowingly encouraging him to write about reasons for certain things. I just thought that was funny.

One of the things that came up in the interview is how the readers gave authors way too much credit for things they might not necessarily have been thinking about when actually writing. Some authors probably try to make themselves appear smarter by pretending that such things certainly were the intent. I don't think this is necessarily a harmful way of doing business, but it can get plain stupid when you have English teachers (*cough* Dr. Walker *cough*) who make you write essays on such things, as if prose has to be taught by analyzing the drivel the English department presents as literature.