I've Got the Power

            I think we’ve beat the dead horse on the issue of if House of Danger should stay in the curriculum. I thought about writing a post against keeping it in the curriculum, just to play devil’s advocate. But I wholeheartedly agree with everyone else (for all the same reasons) that it should stay. So that’s enough of that. As Jessi pointed out, Janelle telling us to write on that subject is manipulation, so I’m choosing to write on something else.

            In writing my chapter addition to House of Danger, I truly realized how powerless the reader is in that book. I know we talked about it in class, but I didn’t completely buy it. I felt like at least I had more control of the story than in linear novels. Once I wrote some for myself, I learned that all of the power is with the writer. I gave my readers two options to escape the chimpanzees at the beginning of my new chapter, and proceeded to write an alternate ending for each option. It turns out, the choice doesn’t really matter: the ending does not depend on the choice. There are infinite possibilities for each option. In fact, I could easily switch which ending I paired with which option and it would still make sense. I could change the reader’s options and still manipulate it to end in the way I wanted. I already had two endings in my head that I wanted to write. All I had to do was make up two arbitrary choices for the reader and attach my endings to them. As the writer, I controlled it all. While it’s true that the reader does have a choice (definition of choose: to select from a number of possibilities), the reader ultimately has no control. The choice is just a way to get to an ending, dictated by the author, which may have absolutely nothing to do with the choice itself.