Leave room for the reader

Readers have a lot of options for how to entertain themselves! Give them good reasons to choose your work.

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Last month my son and I went to a convention (or a reunion? or kind of both?) for The Office. You know, the television show that ended over a decade ago, that all the memes are from. He discovered it recently via some sort of young person section of the internet (he’s 14), and I had never seen it, so we’ve been watching it together.

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Now, why would contemporary teens want to spend time in a fictional earth-toned office full of awkward people doing boring jobs? I really am not sure, but I can hypothesize that it offers a window into a possible future, and makes it look not all that bad? Like, at least there’s jokes and crushes in adulthood! Or maybe in our dramatic current timeline, The Office is soothing in its low-stakes conflicts? Or maybe it’s more simple, and sometimes it’s just that things become popular and then stay popular because they are popular, a kind of fascinatingly boring feedback loop that no one can ever really figure out.

Anyway, the boy wanted to go to the convention and because I am an adult and have a driver’s license (brag), we went together.

Friends said to me, “What a funny thing to do, are you going to write about it?” And I kept thinking, well gosh no I don’t think so! What is there to say? But in fact it was fairly fascinating. I’m kind of neutral on this show — I laugh when we watch it together, and then I promptly forget it exists. But the convention really made me think about fandoms and enthusiasms: how we find community among fellow-fans; how our obsessions serve as shorthand for our selves and how we want to exist in the world.

My other takeaway was that, at a certain point, fans know shows so much better than the people who made the shows.