No bridge needed

I’m still chewing on the discussion going on over on Dear Author. This time it was a comment by Robin that caught my attention.

I also realize that not everyone is aiming for greater understanding across the author-reader divide, that some people are completely comfortable with the separatist position. I have absolutely no problem with that, either. I just tend to gravitate in the direction of bridges.

I read that and I knew bridge was the wrong analogy entirely but I wasn’t sure why. It took me a while and some doodling to figure it out but this is what I came up with. Bridging brings to mind a river at the very least to show a separation of some type or what in mathematical terms is called sets. A set of readers and a set of authors, shown something like this:

And that’s just the wrong picture.

A much better representation is this following where authors are a subset of readers who are a subset of the great population.

Much better. See, no bridge needed because there isn’t a gap to cross.

There is, however, a “fence” around authors that isn’t porous like the one around readers in general. Meaning that while it’s relative easy for anyone to become a reader, becoming an author is exclusive. One has to pass through that that fence, i.e. pass the test of becoming published, and once that’s done then one is no longer simply a reader any longer.

Can an author go back to being simply a reader? Well, I suppose if they are no longer published . . . but that’s not really what we’re talking about is it? What we’re actually talking about is that authors, while still being readers, can no longer speak for readers as if they weren’t authors, too, because they have another ax to grind and appropriately so.

Here’s another point, I didn’t even attempt to put “wanabe authors” AKA unpublished writers on this but I could’ve, probably as a slightly larger circle around the author one. Maybe I should’ve if for no other reason than to make the point that “reader” doesn’t automatically equal “wanabe author”. Not all of us want to be authors, yet another reason why they can’t speak for us.