"You have one goal: to connect with your audience. Therefore, you must track what your audience is feeling at all times. One of the biggest problems I face when watching other people’s movies is I’ll say, ‘This part confuses me’, or whatever, and they’ll say, ‘What I’m intending to say is this’, and they’ll go on about their intentions. None of this has anything to do with my experience as an audience member. "
I opine on this in poetry a lot. People have a tendency to write some super vague poem that completely washes over the audience, and so rather than fix it, they include a preamble that makes the subsequent poem pointless. Then you call them on that and they say "Well, I just write for myself."
If that's so, why are you reading it to a live audience and asking for feedback? If you're not writing it for the audience, save the audience the trouble. I'm sure it's the same way for movies, presentations and pretty much any performance.
In fact, I wrote a poem bashing this very practice recently. Allow me to explain all the clever allusions up front in case they are too obtuse.
This is something that occurs again and again in the creative arts. People say they want to write a poem or a novel, but they end up writing something that's actually best expressed as an essay, or the poem itself becomes a veiled essay (see also: screenplays filled with pointless exposition and explanatory speeches).
It's probably a consequence of the fact that we're all taught in school to write essays, but not to be creative. When we don't know what we're doing, we fall back on that way of expressing ourselves. To beat it, you have to unlearn what you've been taught.
I agree with your last statement; I've loved stories since I was tiny and I don't mean I found them entertaining, I mean I'd just be playing and I'd make up a whole story, my friend and I spent the better part of our pre-teen years playing games in a completely made up world and not 'cowboys and indians' or 'cops and robbers' like everyone else did.
Yet when I got into high school they really tried hammering in Essays to the point where no one knew how to write a real story. You'd get people screwing up, bunching 5 lines of different characters speech into 1 paragraph because it was dealing with one point. People didn't seem to understand that in a piece of creative writing you don't need to have a point to every line as long as every line helps make a point.
I'm working on a novel right now, which coincidentally illustrates this point. My chapters are actually titled as the point of the entire chapter at the moment, here are a few: Casual Subterfuge, The Truth Unveiled and The Advent of (important character). The chapter titles will possibly change, but right now they're as useful as any writing plan I could make because if it isn't setting up later plots and it isn't advancing the plot arc of the chapter, then it gets ripped out.
The biggest thing I noticed in novels when in school was that some people butchered it with a preface. Most SF/F/H writers it's sometimes just a page saying thank you (normally to their spouse, agent and publisher - in that order) however a significant amount do this in the afterword. Yet when I picked up books I was assigned in school the preface took 5 pages describing the purpose of the book and I just thought that was cheap and lazy.
Almost OT, but I hate literature with the criticism at the front. I find it almost impossible to skip without reading a few words and there are always spoilers (this happened to me on Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and The Pearl, and some Stephen King stuff). But if they were an afterword instead, no one would read them...
I hate soundtrack previews for the DVD I'm about to watch for exactly the same reason.
I hated the Crouching Tiger DVD. Since I didn't see the movie in theater, getting the DVD to play involved going through a few menus showing very critical development moments in the movie. Lame.
I opine on this in poetry a lot. People have a tendency to write some super vague poem that completely washes over the audience, and so rather than fix it, they include a preamble that makes the subsequent poem pointless. Then you call them on that and they say "Well, I just write for myself."
If that's so, why are you reading it to a live audience and asking for feedback? If you're not writing it for the audience, save the audience the trouble. I'm sure it's the same way for movies, presentations and pretty much any performance.
In fact, I wrote a poem bashing this very practice recently. Allow me to explain all the clever allusions up front in case they are too obtuse.