Calm Down Literary Theory.

For those of you who don’t know, I am coming up to the end of undergrad for my Bachelor's degree in Creative Writing. I will graduate here in just a few months. With studying writing and literature, I have taken many classes on Literary Theory. If you have never studied this particular topic, it is essentially like those cheap toys you get in kids meals. The toys that are the little red and blue lens and a tiny little picture that looks like a mess of blue and red. When you look through the blue lens, you see one picture, and the red gives you another. These theories are the same as the lenses. We look at one work of literature through different lenses to see different things. It is very interesting, but I recently found myself, over the last few months, having a hard time reading for fun. I pick up a book, and I just can’t get into it, or I can’t read more than a few pages at a time without utilizing one of the lenses to dissect it. This has removed the fun out of reading for me to some extent.
I told a friend about this issue I was having, and they told me a quote, forgive me I can’t cite it I am not sure where on earth it came from. But they a writer was in college trying to learn more about their craft, get a different angle if you will. Their own novel was the topic of a debate, and the teacher had them discussing what the author had meant when they wrote that the sky was blue. Different students gave different analytical answers that sounded very smart but then the author, the one who wrote the very story, raised their hand. The unknowing teacher called upon them, and the author replied: “The sky was blue, the color of the sky was blue.”
We might laugh at that, but it reminded me that I enjoy reading for a reason. It allows me to follow a story and leave the world behind. It is entertainment and sometimes thought-provoking. I was missing the fun and overthinking the entire art of reading. I am working on getting that passion back but refraining from allowing my mind to follow the rabbit's trail and getting lost in my own thoughts. I will simply enjoy the words on the pages as the writer intended.
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