Response to Tyler on Does the author go as deep as we do?

I’m with you on this one, Tyler. I’ve taken several literature classes and every time we get into a discussion of what do you think the author meant by this and what do you think they meant by that, I think to myself, “Maybe he just meant exactly what he put on the page and nothing more”. Honestly, I think there are some pieces of literature that some dead guy wrote 110 years ago and he didn’t mean half the stuff that people get out of it today. If some of the authors could sit in our classrooms and hear the stuff some people come up with, they would probably laugh. On the other hand, I bet the majority of writers of great literature really have spent hundreds of hours contemplating every letter, word, line, grammatical appoint and punctuation. Writing is a craft and I don’t pretend to understand it anymore than you or anyone else but I look at it much like somebody who doesn’t know about football would; to them it might look like a bunch of guys just chasing around a ball trying to score but if you’re really into football you know that there is a lot more skill and craft to it than just chasing around a ball trying to score. .