Deborah Cooke: Author

Phew! Now we’ve finished the EMBER’S KISS blog tour – and I have sore fingers from traipsing all over the internet – it’s time to settle back into our usual blog routine. I’ve been doing some thinking and writing some posts and today you get to read the first of them.

This is an idea I’ve had for a while, but it’s been percolating again. I’m curious as to what you all think of it, so here we go. Do you think that the art you view shapes your life? Or do you think your character shapes the art you choose to view?

Let me explain what I mean. We choose to view certain kinds of art – as movies, as books, as entertainment, as stimulus – and we each have specific tastes. This is a good thing, as otherwise there would be one book published each month and one painting created each quarter, and one movie produced each week. The diversity within any given medium is due to the variety of our tastes: the popularity of any given example is a reflection of how many people find it resonant at any given time. Let’s go beyond that a bit more.

For example, romance is a very popular genre of fiction. There have been studies over the years which declare that people who read romance tend to have more active sex lives. (Those reports get a lot of media attention!) There have also been reports that romance readers tend to be more optimistic about life – even if they don’t believe that love conquers all, they have a more positive outlook than the population at large.

So, which came first? Do they read romance because they are fundamentally optimists and thus prefer to read about happy endings? Or have they come to believe in the good guys winning because they read romance?

Here’s another example. I know several people who love a certain sub-genre of women’s fiction which is very dramatic. Each chapter ends on a cliffhanger in these books, and the stakes are invariably life or death. I personally find these books exhausting to read and a bit breathless in their anxiety, which is why I won’t name any specific authors. But the readers I know who love these books seem to have a need to create drama in their own lives, too. Every mole hill becomes a mountain. The stakes are high. The repercussions are potentially dire. Talking to these people can be as exhausting as reading one of these books. So, do they find these books appealing because that’s already their perspective and the books resonate what they already believe, or has reading these books changed their worldview to be reliant upon high drama?

This extends into other areas, too. Overall, the pacing of fiction has increased in the past twenty years. There is more white space on the page (even if it’s a digital page), more focus on action and dialogue, and less introspection. Does this change in the structure of popular fiction mirror a change in ourselves, our society and our expectations, or did fiction create the social change? Does it amplify something that already exists? Does it make the effect stronger or simply mirror it?

What do you think? Do you see an echo of what you read in your own character and perspective? Or do you think that you choose what to read on the basis of your nature? How does what you read mirror how you are?