How Long is the Word of the Author Worth Anything?

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NoShip

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When an Author speakes about his creation, we usually listen. How long after a work is published should we care what the author has to say about it?
 
I think we should always care what the author says/said, but certainly after some years (or the author's actual death), without being slavish to their vision. I guess we never have to do that, as when an author puts a work into the world, we can all see aspects of it from our own experiences. But I like to hear what the author themselves meant by certain metaphors or plot points.

Also, as years pass, there may be new interpretations of the original material. For one thing, with distance we can see how a show might reflect its time in a way that perhaps was not noticeable at the time. For another, a good work can reflect on another time as well as its own. For instance, I have seen Shakespeare plays set in the Nazi era (Richard III), the 1920's (Much Ado about Nothing), the 1960's (forget which one); the king in a play can seem a hero or a villain depending on the era it's set in (and maybe some creative edits).

Are you thinking specifically to Buffy and Whedon/Noxon/etc. or some other example?
 
I am thinking specifically about Buffy and Whedon/Noxon and others because of the commentaries. The commentaries were recorded between one and four years after the season being commented upon ended. I worked in television and TV is so hectic that everyone involved had a hard time remembering stuff from one week prior much less one year. So i have always been sceptical of the commentaries and other statements made years after the actual production of an episode or season. I don't know i how long an showrunner or writer or actor or director or whoever should be considered authoritative about their work. I think there should be an end date.
 
I think it depends on the Word and the God.

If the Word of God explains something that would never be explained in the medium itself, that should likely be the closest thing to permanent. If the Word states that what was written and shown was not what happened, then that can be discarded much faster, because it's bad writing. The way I put it before is if you ask "What's round, orange and smells like an orange?" and the audience answers that with "Orange" and God says, "No, a Ferrari," then that is simply shoddy writing and should be ignored. If what's shown differs from what's claimed to have happened, then you have to ignore the claim because firstly it insults the audience and secondly it literally puts everything shown in doubt. I would think that would be classed as gaslighting the audience?
 
Okay, it's sounds like what you are really asking is, does the author enjoy a special authority over the interpretation of his work? That answer is no. In literature, they call it "Death of the author." In history, the two criteria evaluated are weight and bias. As parties close to the event, they should get due consideration, but that's not a magisterium, that's just, this is what I recall about the matter, take it for what you will. I am attaching a monologue by Andrew Robinson from the DS9 documentary, that I personally enjoy concerning the matter.

 
I read one screenwriting book that used the phrase "If it ain't up there, it ain't up there" meaning the work stands on its own and commentary by the author after the fact is of no importance. This is another way of saying "death of the author". One area where this showed up is the question of whether the comics were canon. If I was buying the rights to put out a comic book based on a series, I would insist as part of the contract that the original author say that the comics are canon. The fact that the comics depart seriously from the existing program shows to anyone that they are not canon and Joss' statement that they are canon was just part of the purchase order.
 
As a writer and an avid reader, I think that the word of the author should hold weight in the interpretation of the work. I don't think that there is a time limit to how long afterwards an author's interpretation of his own work remains valid. Tolkien's word should still be the primary influencer of any interpretation of Lord of the Rings, for instance. The exception to this is if what is obvious in the text contradicts what the author is saying. This could be a failure to execute his idea on page or screen, or it could be retroactive editing, but in either case it can be ignored. There are, of course, differences between a static work (a novel, a movie) versus an ongoing work (a franchise.)
 
In answer to the initial question, we should always care what the author writes.
However if the author says a load of crap it'll be safe to ignore it.
What I do want to know is about the initial post by NoShip in which
the word - ' Speaks ' - was spelt, I believe, wrong.
So my question is this,
was the word 'Speaks' spoken as speakes by NoShip in order for the word speaks to be written speakes by NoShip?
 
Ethan Reigns said:
I read one screenwriting book that used the phrase "If it ain't up there, it ain't up there" meaning the work stands on its own and commentary by the author after the fact is of no importance.
Click to expand...
That's a good general standard, for writing episodic television, or for writing a film.

Tolkien being the exception. I mean, you should still try to write a self contained adaptation, but how do you properly adapt something like the Mirror of Galadriel? See. There's this guy named Feanor?
 
Ethan Reigns said:
I read one screenwriting book that used the phrase "If it ain't up there, it ain't up there" meaning the work stands on its own and commentary by the author after the fact is of no importance.
Click to expand...

I mentioned that sometimes there is no in-universe way that something would be in the work; one particular example I was thinking of was in the Dresden Files when Jim Butcher explains how Mouse is able to worry a fallen angel, because he couldn't see any way that it would be explained in the text.

AlphaFoxtrot said:
Tolkien being the exception.
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Of course, the way around that which Tolkien used is to write hundreds of pages of appendices with background information!
 
XanderesqueMan said:
As a writer and an avid reader, I think that the word of the author should hold weight in the interpretation of the work. I don't think that there is a time limit to how long afterwards an author's interpretation of his own work remains valid. Tolkien's word should still be the primary influencer of any interpretation of Lord of the Rings, for instance. The exception to this is if what is obvious in the text contradicts what the author is saying. This could be a failure to execute his idea on page or screen, or it could be retroactive editing, but in either case it can be ignored. There are, of course, differences between a static work (a novel, a movie) versus an ongoing work (a franchise.)
Click to expand...

I'm curious. Would you consider BTVS a static work or an ongoing work? Because I think you have a good way of breaking through the fog that surrounds it.
 
NoShip said:
I'm curious. Would you consider BTVS a static work or an ongoing work? Because I think you have a good way of breaking through the fog that surrounds it.
Click to expand...

Thats a different medium. Tolkien with his books is very different to a TV show where you have dead lines to pump out 22 episodes worth of scripts before it goes into production. You also have guidelines on what you can and can't do
To use an example, Drew Goddard and Steve Deknight did the Angel episode Why We Fight. How this came about was that Joss saw the Movie U571 and went into the writers room with an idea, Angel and Spike on a Nazi Submarine !
And that was it, they then had a week to write an episode while somehow having Spike and Angel meet in the 40s.
 
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