Reader-Character Confusion & Character-Author Confusion

[Bramblethorn]

I'm not even going to try and claim to have a real insight into Agatha Christie, since the woman wrote A LOT while I have only four of those books standing on my bookshelves. But, as far as I know, the woman hasn't "spent a career writing about murders", but rather writing about solving murders. I never heard about her books being particularly graphic. She focused on the mystery instead of the violence.

Missed this disclaimer before writing my reply above - in that light it's understandable that you hadn't seen the side of her work that I mentioned.

I think it's generally fair to summarise Christie's mysteries as being primarily technical (murder as a logic puzzle to be solved), but often with a secondary psychological angle to them. Sometimes the motivation for the murder is obvious, often money to be inherited, but sometimes it's part of the mystery. I think the psychological side is explored a bit more in the Miss Marple books than in the Poirots, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was part of Christie's reason for creating a second sleuth when she was already doing well with Poirot.

 

[LilyWaters]

With regards to Stephen King, I'd say it's important to note the caveat, "Seems like". I'm not saying anything about him personally, but there have been plenty of serial killers who seemed pretty normal to their neighbors.

Stephen King's first novel was published in 1973, 50 years ago. Since then, he has written 64 more (averaging more than one per year!) and over 200 short stories.

If he managed to be a successful hidden serial killer on top of that, it would be the time management feat of the century!

I actually find that he writes with tremendous pathos. The side of the good is always very clear, imho. This can be a criticism - you can definitely tell a King book when you see it - but I really enjoy his work.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Stephen King's first novel was published in 1973, 50 years ago. Since then, he has written 64 more (averaging more than one per year!) and over 200 short stories.

If he managed to be a successful hidden serial killer on top of that, it would be the time management feat of the century!

I actually find that he writes with tremendous pathos. The side of the good is always very clear, imho. This can be a criticism - you can definitely tell a King book when you see it - but I really enjoy his work.

I'm not saying or implying that he is anything as extreme as that, my point is simply that people can appear perfectly "normal" on the surface while being far from it.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Yeah, that's exactly what I was talking about.

The first excerpt can be summarized as "I saw an opportunity and held him underwater. They couldn't resuscitate him." - No emotion, no thought process instead of the spontaneous decision, no graphic description of the struggle, no insight into what the victim felt.

The second excerpt can be summarized as "I stabbed him multiple times and was scared about being discovered." - Again, no emotion about the act itself, no thought process about why he's doing it, no struggle, and blood isn't even mentioned.

IMHO, she actually is doing a lot to convey his thought processes and emotions here (such as they are), it's just that she's doing it subtly and by implication - "showing" rather than "telling". I'd still consider that "description", but if you were talking about more explicit description, put that down to misunderstanding on my part.

You mention "very little to no insight", but that's intentional: Christie is telling the story from the perspective of an unreliable narrator who has very little insight into his own motivations (something that contributes to his eventual undoing), so she can't spell them out.

For instance, he doesn't have the self-awareness to make observations like "every time I killed somebody it felt easier". Instead, Christie lets him imply it to the reader. In the first scene, "of course" his initial reaction is to help his friend. In the second, the thing that comes "naturally" is not helping, but pride at getting away with it. From there he escalates to premeditated murder, and then finally to killing for pleasure, even though it means going to jail.

Likewise, the lack of emotion about killing his friends isn't because she forgot or self-censored, it's a very deliberate omission that the reader is intended to notice and interpret. He's not going to say "guess I'm a sociopath" (or whatever the terminology would've been at the time), or even explicitly articulate "I didn't feel anything about killing them", because to him that isn't noteworthy. She contrasts that against the emotion he does feel in those scenes - he wants the watch very badly, and he's proud of having gotten away with murder.

If anything, I think that approach does a better job of putting the reader in his head than if he'd spelled it out "I'm a sociopath, I don't feel anything for other people's suffering", because even if a sociopath has noticed that he doesn't care about other people's suffering... he probably isn't going to mention it, because he doesn't care that he doesn't care.

The third excerpt, where the murderer tells Greta about his newfound joy in killing, is probably the scariest. But it's, again, not very graphic or detailed.

It's not, but I don't think those things are always essential for description. A good author can convey a lot without spelling everything out.

It's scary because you learn that people like that exist! It is hardly a character exploration into how to stab someone to death, how to drown someone, or how to scare your girlfriend. It's all written like something she heard happened, with very little to no insight. And, most important of all, it's all rather short.

I don't think Christie had any particular knowledge to impart on how to stab or drown somebody. As a trained pharmacist her specialty was poison, and on that topic she got a bit more talkative - there's plenty of information in her books on how to kill people with substances that would've been available in her day. In Endless Night, the protagonist explains that he and Greta murdered Ellie by tampering with capsules she took for hay fever, inserting wasp poison (cyanide) from the garden shed.

Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair At Styles, features a more complex poisoning where she draws on her pharmacological training to describe exactly how to turn a commonplace medication into a lethal poison by adding another readily available medication.

In comparison, to illustrate what I'm talking about, take a look at this:

(FWIW, because of previous context in this discussion, I initially thought you were quoting from one of madelinemasoch's stories here until I clicked through and checked the author. I don't think you had the slightest intention of giving that impression, but as there's room for misunderstanding, I'll note that the quoted ball-busting scene is not one of hers.)

Now THAT's a graphic description of a violent act. It's painting a very detailed picture of the act, allows the victim to express their pain, AND shows off how the mother (yes, that's a mother doing it to her son) enjoys inflicting said pain.

Agatha Christie did NEVER go to such lengths.

It's certainly more graphic and detailed, and also pretty gross. As far as the physical actions go, it's more descriptive. But for me Christie's approach, despite her much lighter touch, is far more effective as psychological description and in some ways more disturbing.

(For me. I acknowledge that other people may have the opposite reaction and that's entirely valid. I'm not trying to tell anybody they're wrong if that story leaves them feeling ill, just discussing why that's not a universal response.)

Christie's approach in Endless Night does a lot to convey who this guy is and what makes him tick. We can understand why he commits his murders, how he came to marry a woman with the intention of killing her. We could probably guess at how he might behave in other social interactions. It's scary because we can believe such a person could exist.

The ballbuster scene (it's not really enough for "story") is fantasy built entirely around one specific fetish. Laura's entire personality is "loves humiliating and torturing her own son" with no attempt at any kind of internal logic to that. Nor to the victim either - apparently he's been living with her for nineteen years, you'd think that by now either this extreme level of abuse would've destroyed him or he'd have taken action to leave her. But apparently he has...magical testes that grow back...and I guess maybe he has a magical psyche that does the same? Nothing in here gives me that sense of "these people could exist".

It feels more like watching Wile E. Coyote get an anvil dropped on his head. If that happened to somebody IRL, or even to a coyote, it'd be a horrible thing to witness. But the unreality of the fiction largely negates that response - for me - and without supporting evidence, it doesn't suggest to me that the author wants to torture anybody's genitals IRL, any more than I come away from Looney Tunes believing that Chuck Jones wanted to drop anvils on people for real.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I'm not sure this is true. Consider Stephen King. He's spent an entire lifetime imagining and writing about horrific things. But he's done interviews where he insists that there was nothing particularly strange or dark about his upbringing and as far as I can tell he seems like a pretty well-adjusted guy.

I think for some authors, writing about horrific things is part of how they get to be "well-adjusted". King might have had a happy upbringing, but as an adult he's had his demons, and he's talked about how some of his fiction was about processing that:

Sometimes you confess. You always hide what you're confessing to. That's one of the reasons why you make up the story. When I wrote The Shining, for instance, the protagonist of The Shining is a man who has broken his son's arm, who has a history of child beating, who is beaten himself. And as a young father with two children, I was horrified by my occasional feelings of real antagonism toward my children. Won't you ever stop? Won't you ever go to bed? And time has given me the idea that probably there are a lot of young fathers and young mothers both who feel very angry, who have angry feelings toward their children. But as somebody who has been raised with the idea that father knows best and Ward Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver, and all this stuff, I would think to myself, Oh, if he doesn't shut up, if he doesn't shut up... So when I wrote this book I wrote a lot of that down and tried to get it out of my system, but it was also a confession. Yes, there are times when I felt very angry toward my children and have even felt as though I could hurt them. Well, my kids are older now. Naomi is fifteen and Joey is thirteen and Owen is eight, and they're all super kids, and I don't think I've laid a hand on one of my kids in probably seven years, but there was a time...

Iain M. Banks is another example. His first published novel, The Wasp Factory, was reviewed as "a work of unparalleled depravity", and having read it it's not hard to understand why. He mentioned that many of the psychopathic protagonist's traits were written as hyperbolic versions of his own more innocent teenage interests. But his interest there seems to have been to understand violence and cruelty rather than to indulge in them.

 

[madelinemasoch]

(FWIW, because of previous context in this discussion, I initially thought you were quoting from one of madelinemasoch's stories here until I clicked through and checked the author. I don't think you had the slightest intention of giving that impression, but as there's room for misunderstanding, I'll note that the quoted ball-busting scene is not one of hers.)

Thank you for that and for your other compelling comments. I wouldn't write something that gory in an erotica piece.

The ballbuster scene (it's not really enough for "story") is fantasy built entirely around one specific fetish. Laura's entire personality is "loves humiliating and torturing her own son" with no attempt at any kind of internal logic to that. Nor to the victim either - apparently he's been living with her for nineteen years, you'd think that by now either this extreme level of abuse would've destroyed him or he'd have taken action to leave her. But apparently he has...magical testes that grow back...and I guess maybe he has a magical psyche that does the same? Nothing in here gives me that sense of "these people could exist".

It feels more like watching Wile E. Coyote get an anvil dropped on his head. If that happened to somebody IRL, or even to a coyote, it'd be a horrible thing to witness. But the unreality of the fiction largely negates that response - for me - and without supporting evidence, it doesn't suggest to me that the author wants to torture anybody's genitals IRL, any more than I come away from Looney Tunes believing that Chuck Jones wanted to drop anvils on people for real.

I guess my takeaway from all this is that I'm proud that I'm not as bad as the ballbuster, not in terms of brutality but in terms of believability... because I make certain people very impassioned about what I've written, so they must have that feeling that "these people could exist."

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

The ballbuster scene (it's not really enough for "story") is fantasy built entirely around one specific fetish. Laura's entire personality is "loves humiliating and torturing her own son" with no attempt at any kind of internal logic to that. Nor to the victim either - apparently he's been living with her for nineteen years, you'd think that by now either this extreme level of abuse would've destroyed him or he'd have taken action to leave her. But apparently he has...magical testes that grow back...and I guess maybe he has a magical psyche that does the same? Nothing in here gives me that sense of "these people could exist".

Well, just to recap, as I get the feeling you think I'm trying to debate whether or not AC is a good writer:

The debate OP's initial post started was about whether or not it is fair for readers to think that an author who writes about deranged shit, actually is INTO deranged shit outside their stories. My argument was that it is hard to write detailed, vivid descriptions of atrocious actions without putting yourself in a dark place unless you either learned to compartmentalize on a very high level, or truly enjoy dwelling in those fantasies.

Again... not debating AG's writing prowess. Just saying that there's a difference between mentioning a murder and working it out in great detail over and over again.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Well, just to recap, as I get the feeling you think I'm trying to debate whether or not AC is a good writer:

I didn't get that impression. I think we're more running up against conflicting ideas of what exactly is "descriptive". I'll also acknowledge that I'd lost track of earlier context in which you were referring specifically to detailed/vivid; had I remembered that context, I would've interpreted your later mention of "descriptive" more in that light.

The debate OP's initial post started was about whether or not it is fair for readers to think that an author who writes about deranged shit, actually is INTO deranged shit outside their stories. My argument was that it is hard to write detailed, vivid descriptions of atrocious actions without putting yourself in a dark place unless you either learned to compartmentalize on a very high level, or truly enjoy dwelling in those fantasies.

I think it's fair to say that people who frequently write detailed, vivid descriptions of atrocious actions probably are people who think about those things a lot (unless they're very good at compartmentalisation). I'm less sold on the argument that this implies they enjoy those fantasies. Yes, this is an erotica site and a lot of what people write about is stuff that gives them pleasure, but by no means all of it.

I've written stories here about a protagonist losing her partner to dementia, being lied to by a partner, realising that the person they want to be with doesn't want to be with them and having to accept that loss, suffering autistic meltdown after being overwhelmed by pressures. My current work-in-progress, if it ever gets finished, will be about a musician who's trying to recover after witnessing the sudden violent death of her brother and bandmate.

None of those are experiences that I enjoy imagining, even as fantasy. I write about them because they're things I either can't help imagining or don't have to imagine. Some people write in order to escape a land where everything is awesome, nobody ever gets old or sick, and all the orgasms are fantastic; I'm more often writing to tell myself, and anybody else who cares to listen, that the world can be a hard place but what we do in it still matters. That works better for me than escapism, and there's still room for erotica in it. From the reader reactions, I'm not the only one who values that kind of story.

I'd also note that MM's original post was about people reacting "as if the author and character are the same" and that even when the author does indeed enjoy "dwelling in those fantasies", it doesn't mean they actually are the same as the character in that fantasy, or want to be.

There are cases where I will draw inferences about an author based on their fiction, particularly when that fiction is corroborated by other information. But that's a complex evaluation, and I think it's particularly difficult to interpret author motivation from extreme kink stories of this kind, for reasons that partly boil down to "the psychology of arousal is complicated and the psychology of kink is ridiculously complicated".* I have enough difficulty figuring out where some of my own kinks come from, without trying to interpret a stranger's.

I've read a few of Madeline's stories. They weren't for me. I can form that judgement, and move on to things that are for me, without needing to ascribe a motivation to her for writing them. (Likewise ditto for the author of that ball-busting story.) If I really needed to know why she focusses on these particular themes, I'd probably start by asking her.

*Noting that "does the author support this shit IRL?" is not the same question as "should this site ban these stories?" The folk who own Literotica get to decide what kind of site they want this to be and how much risk they're prepared to take in regard to stuff that might be judged as "obscenity".