Writing: Build-ups and resolutions versus shocks and limbo · 5:51pm Apr 6th, 2014
WARNING: Contains violence.
I’ve blogged before about what makes a narrative a story, and in particular noted that “All the Pretty Pony Princesses” is complete in the way poems should be but not in the way stories should be. Lately I’ve been reading stories in literary journals (the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Tin House, Narrative, The Kenyon Review), and trying to figure out what they want.
What they want seems to be the same kind of non-story as “All the Pretty Pony Princesses”—a narrative that establishes a situation, a mood, an inconclusive ending, and (though not all journals require this) a bleak and hopeless outlook on life. I don’t like these kinds of stories, though I can see some merit to their incompleteness. More on that in a later post.
Writers for literary journals often talk about wanting a story to grab them, shock them, make them feel something, wring them out. They sounds like women explaining why they love a man who beats them. I think they like these incomplete stories because they hurt more. They bring the reader to despair and then leave her there.
One reader told me by PM that AtPPP threw him into a fearful and depressive rut for an entire day. It was like he couldn’t get out of the story. It took him to an awful place and then just ended, leaving him there.
Maybe that's why traditional stories have conclusion and closure—so they don't take people into an altered state and leave them there. They need something to say, "You are now exiting the story." Maybe the usual purpose of fiction is to talk people through intense emotions in a controlled way: foreshadowing what’s going to happen, warning them when things are about to get bad, giving them something to hold on while taking them through something terrifying, then carefully, gradually setting them back down on the ground.
I vaguely remember a passage from a short science fiction story that I read in college, that went something like this:
We walked down the broad stone staircase toward the Potomac. A jogger in an orange sweatsuit sat halfway down the stairs, shading his eyes and staring dully at the water while sipping from one of those plastic water bottles with a permanently-attached straw. A few pigeons clustered around him hopefully, ignoring us as we passed.
The river was beautiful, I suppose, but the wind blew off the shore, and the water was so far below us, and so well-guarded by railings and hedges, that it was more like an ornamental backdrop to our conversation than a place. We paid more attention to the squirrels that regarded us with mixed curiosity and indignation as we walked impudently across their lawns. Unlike the tourists who passed us going the other way, the squirrels weren’t afraid to make direct eye contact. She kept trying to lure them in closer by pretending to have food in her hand. A friend had told her that she’d touched a squirrel on the Mall, and now she didn’t want to be outdone in communing with nature, even though the squirrels were so fat and slow that their claim to membership in Nature was just a technicality.
We were passing by the Kennedy Center, across the street from us, and she wanted to go up and walk around its terraces. I said we didn’t have time. She gave me one of her impish grins, and dashed towards it, and a bus smeared her across the driver side of a dirty white Honda Civic parked by the side of the road.
When I read that I stopped, shocked by the sudden violence. But the writer part of me was wondering, “Why haven’t I read anything like that before? It’s so effective.”
It's effective at shocking the reader, but readers don't want to be shocked, not really. Even in horror novels, writers just don’t throw the reader into horror with no warning. Yet real life does. Tolstoy was in an artillery regiment during the Crimean War, and his book War and Peace is sometimes praised for its realistic portrayal of war. What struck me most about his war scenes was how boring they were. Tolstoy somehow managed to describe bloody battles up close in a way that wasn’t exciting, just confusing and exhausting.
I haven’t been in a war, but I bet that part of why war isn’t (for most people) thrilling is that it doesn’t have a soundtrack or dramatic cinematography to tell you what to pay attention to. For a conflict to be exciting requires some certainty and dramatic structure: Will this next scene decide something? What’s my motivation? What am I trying to do? Am I, in fact, in danger? A character in a novel usually goes into a conflict with a cause worth fighting for, some specific tactical objective, and a clear threat to watch and overcome. A character in a Tolstoy war scene wanders around the battlefield in a haze of gun smoke, unsure where the battle is, how much longer it’s likely to go on, or what he should be doing. Men around him fire muskets blindly into the smoke, or work on their cannons like auto mechanics, or stand around waiting for orders, and every now and then, one of them is dashed to the ground by a cannonball or a stray musket ball.
(Throwing all wars together as "war" is an oversimplification. The thick smoke, close ranges, and bad communications of 19th-century wars, the grinding trench warfare of World War I, the blitzes of World War II, the surreal aimlessness of Vietnam, and the diplomat-soldier of Afghanistan are all different.)
I bet that one reason war can be traumatic is the suddenness and unexpectedness of violence. It can teach people that just because things are quiet right now doesn’t mean you won’t be covered in blood two seconds from now.
This isn’t what we read fiction for. We want, if anything, fiction that helps us cope better with the world. That’s why stories have build-ups and resolutions. They’re going to hit us with some strong emotions, maybe good, maybe bad. But they’re going to walk us through it slowly, so we can be ready for it, like a fencing instructor teaching a move in slow motion. And they’re going to take us out of it and close it off, so we know we’re safe again.
When have you seen a writer do something suddenly, without warning, or end a story without closure, and you thought it was the right thing for them to do?
I like that scene you described. Like you said, it's effective (I had to read it twice before the horror clicked). The important thing is that it doesn't end there, that that is the beginning of the story, not the end. Violence should only be the resolution when it leaves the reader in a state of limbo about the morality of it, otherwise the violence should almost always be the catalyst.
As for uncertain endings, just leaving readers in a dark place doesn't have value unless it also leaves them something to ponder, a question to find an answer to or a dilemma to consider as it may apply to their own lives.
I recently read Cold in Gardez's story The Lantern. At the original end there is no resolution to the characters' physical plight, but there is to their emotional one. So, perhaps, that is one case where it is acceptable?
Douglas Coupland. Repeatedly.
He ended 'Generation X' with a dangling plotline and the protagonist standing in a random field getting a group hug from a bunch of mentally handicapped children. On the surface it is the most random, unsatisfying ending. Under the surface, the guy's big issue has been total inability to connect and the increasing chaos of his story is about him being forced down to the emotional core he's not prepared to admit is there.
He gets hugged and he's there, in the moment. He's completed his journey and is going on with his life, and Coupland never once explicitly says this, but he's been working like crazy for the whole book to establish it.
For this reason, it's not EVEN a dilemma or a question. It's a traditional, deeply satisfying and well set-up ending in the DISGUISE of a question or an abstraction to ponder.
By the same token, your Pretty Pony Princesses fic has a traditional satisfying ending in its way. It's an epiphany story where you realise that Twilight is utterly mad, yet still loved—and that poor Fluttershy has a much harder life than Twi is prepared to admit, yet Shy is the real hero of the story and she wins because she hasn't been broken or become untrue to herself. The 'ending' is simply to see Fluttershy fully, and she's beautiful (though it's sad).
I don't think your hit-by-bus example is effective at all unless it does something with that dislocation, and you've not shown that it does. It looks like 'stunt writing' to me, and worthless unless it serves a function below the surface. It could indicate an unreliable narrator who's a psychopath, for instance, if he simply won't react to the event.
Good for you.
George R. R. Martin does this in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, with characters — even important characters — being maimed or killed in sudden and unexpected ways. I guess this is why the series is simultaneously cherished and hated; it goes for shock.
Given the size of his saga, I think it's well used. It keeps the reader on his toes, but it's not used so much as to desensitize him. I would personally have preferred something with less of that, though, and I'm unlikely to ever read another of his books again after I finish the Song of Ice and Fire series, simply because I prefer less shocking reading.
Caramon's death at the start of Dragons of a Fallen Sun was quite abrupt too. Heart attack at seeing a friend he thought dead for many years, while at the top of the stairs of his home, consequently falling down (I think; I don't have the book with me right now). The same authors do kill important characters in sudden ways in other books, but even when it's sudden or in an apparently ridiculous way (Caramon is not their first character to die from a heart attack) it usually has some foreshadowing at least.
Those I don't have much of an issue with. Even when the death is sudden or unexpected, in the books by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman there's a sense of meaning to blunt the shock (though the death of Palin's brothers "off screen" just before Dragons of a Summer Flame did irk me).
I kind of hate to disagree, but without more context, I think that's an out-and-out terrible ending. Largely because it's a terrible sentence.
Like 1986035 , the horrible bit didn't click for me until I'd read it a few times. It never would have clicked at all without you saying that there was something horrible going on. And even after having it laboriously pointed out to me, I'm still barely capable of processing the idea that the passage is talking about someone being hit by a bus rather than splashed by a bus driving through a puddle. The passage uses water imagery repeatedly, which primes the reader to keep water in mind. And the passage is grounded in the mundane all the way up to that last sentence, priming the reader to anticipate the mundane.
Maybe the issue here is just that I'm more attached to Orwell's idea of transparent prose than some writers. I think the descriptive work in that passage is very enjoyable. But from a writing perspective, it feels like the author is either trying to put together a big visual metaphor by highlighting water and mundaneness, in which case the prose is distinctly non-transparent, or he/she is just flubbing the delivery by allowing the reader so much license to read the most important sentence in that passage in completely the wrong way.
I know this isn't entirely on topic, so let me bring it back around. If a writer wants to provide a shock ending, great. I think those can be wonderful, for all the reasons I've seen mentioned here. But if you want to do it, you'd damn well better make sure you're delivering the punch correctly and not just windmilling your arms.
1986185
I'd actually tend to argue that George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, while certainly having a high body count, isn't really all that shocking.
Now I'll admit, it's been a decade and a half since I started reading the series, so I've lost some perspective on how those first few installments felt, but for as long as I can remember, it's seemed to me that what GRRM is doing is more a reaction against bad logic in genre tropes and less actual shock. Lots of characters die, but in many if not most cases, they seem to be characters who, really, you should be able to see dying from a long ways off. Spoiler text for further discussion (NB: I'm talking about all five books below).
Certainly Eddard's execution and the Red Wedding don't seem like they ought to be big surprises. They're shocking mostly because readers (or viewers) aren't used to seeing characters they've grown to like killed so casually, but both events are foreshadowed to the hilt and disbelief of that foreshadowing is really the only excuse for shock I think. The later deaths in Book 3 are, again, the sorts of things you should be able to see coming a mile away by that point. Same goes for Quentyn Martell in Book 5, who is pretty much begging for death. Jaime losing his hand is somewhat unexpected but also very reasonable from a character writing perspective—you give a character the biggest problem they can have. Most writers aren't willing to go as far, but the choice is very sensible. The only shock events which don't seem terribly well foreshadowed to me are Renly's death, Lysa's death, and Jon Snow's death. And of those, I don't think the first is played as a big event in its own right but more as evidence of Melisandre's power. The second I found legitimately shocking, though totally in character. It actually did destroy some foreshadowing, and it took things in a genuinely unexpected direction. The third felt like cheap author manipulation, given that it's hard to believe it'll stick with Melisandre sitting right there and all the unused Jon Snow foreshadowing, and given that Book 5 was kind of a train wreck in general, with GRRM basically losing the plot and half his established characterization. I'm a big fan of the series, but I think the slow publishing schedule is taking its toll on GRRM's ability to keep his story straight.
Anyway, those are my thoughts.
This brought to my mind "the red wedding" in Game of Thrones.
I unfortunately started watching the tv series already half-spoilered; but when I started reading the actual books...I started seeing foreshadowing everywhere.
Seriously, there's a chapter preceding the wedding emphasizing the role hospitality (in a classical sense) has in their culture, it's explicitly mentioned that the Starks are doing a detour for this wedding and are going to be in a vulnerable position, it's said that the host is untrustworthy, etc etc etc.
And yet, in recent popular culture, it's held as one of the most traumatic and sudden massacres in fiction.
O evilest of horses, what are your opinions on this?
I'm glad I'm not the only one who was confused by the bus splash sentence the first time through.
Now, as for killing off characters suddenly, I'd say it depends largely on your genre and level of realism. Adventure novels for example, generally aren't very realistic, because if they were, the Good guys would be killed about five times over, instead of miraculously just barely surviving each peril while dodging bullets and bad guys.
The answer to your question is pretty much never. And I am glad to see someone actually manage to give a good and comprehensive explanation for why I hate that kind of thing in writing.
1986200 It's not an ending. It's near the beginning of the story. It's supposed to happen in the middle of a mundane sentence, to give you no warning at all, not even a tenth of a second, just like life. That's why it's shocking. Sorry I flubbed the sentence by using the word "splash". I wrote the whole thing just now; I only remember the original had a bus, which struck someone in the middle of a sentence, without warning.
1986185 I don't think Game of Thrones deaths are shocking in the way I mean here. They use dramatic structure. The story builds up to them, you know the characters are in danger, and the death ties in with the plot. Game of Thrones is traditional storytelling, not an avant-garde literary journal story.
1986259 Can't comment, stopped reading after the first book.
On Sales: When selling stories to a magazine, you are not selling them to the readers, or to the editors, you are selling them to what the editors think the readers need to read. If the editors are a bunch of depressed end-of-the-world mopes, and you send them a story full of happy butterflies and smiles, it's going to bounce. Hard. If you send the New York Times a story detailing how government tax cuts and spending restrictions will reign in governmental bloat and result in massive economic gains, it won't get published. Period. Trying to make either of them buy a story that does not fit their template is like trying to get Luna to eat her alfalfa. Good luck with that.
On the introduction of violent events into a story: Real-World violence tends to abrupt appearances without any real lead up. In an auto accident, at best there are 5 stages, and at worst you only get steps 1 and 5.
1) Everything is clear.
2) He can't possibly do that. He'd pull out in front of me.
3) What is he doing?
4) Brakes!
5) *Bang!*
I prefer not to do it that way. I'm writing a story, not Real Life.
In a story, an abrupt event makes you do just what
1986035 had to do: read it a few times to figure out what happened. And once you do that, you've broken that warm fuzzy floating sensation you get when reading a good book. Reality has interrupted your fantasy. I much prefer to forshadow the heck out of upcoming violence, slow time up considerably during the event, and hand-wave a lot of the unimportant picky details (See 'Diplomacy' if you want my angle on violence representation.)
Stories do this all the time with positive or ambiguous tones rather than voilent or shocking ones. Nobody really complains that much.
I think the bigger issue is that different people appreciate different emotional payoffs. Preferences that are completely incompatable with each other.
This is why nobody likes surprises anymore. Half the people out there want to surprise us in a way that will upset/disappoint us.
Most people are not emotional masochists and do not want bad endings, especially if those endings are not profoundly meaningful but rather simply experiential.
I dislike this experiential writing on an intellectual level because I feel that everything in the story should entertain the reader, yes, but it should also serve the story rather than exist solely for reader impact.
1986239
I have to disagree, really. Going against genre conventions and expectation IS shocking, and in the case of A Song of Ice and Fire, there are a few events which really are quite sudden. Ned's death is by far the most so, though; he was clearly set up as the protagonist of the first book, and the whole thing had seemed to center around him. All of his kids were important, his wife was important, he figured out a dark secret, he was a good man alone in a sea of awful people, he stood up for what was right, ect. The fact that he just got his head lopped off was very shocking, because he was the protagonist of the story. That just doesn't happen, normally, and as such it was very effective. Yes, we COULD have seen it coming... but on the other hand, we saw people working against it to spare his life, and it could have easily gone the other way. Saying it wasn't shocking is pretty silly - people were very shocked by it. The Red Wedding is the same way - merely because something is foreshadowed does not mean it isn't shocking, it merely means it wasn't out of nowhere, and again, in most other stories, Ned would not have lost his head and the Red Wedding would not have happened the way it did. These are very unusual events in narratives, because we expect them to follow certain rules which these events thoroughly subverted.
That being said, they did not END with these events; even A Game of Thrones ended on the (arguably upbeat) note of the dragons returning to life, so we were left with horror, but also a bit of hope, I think. I really, really, really wanted to read the next book after I finished A Game of Thrones. I wanted to read the next book SO BAD. But it didn't leave me feeling like it hadn't been a book; it was a reasonable place to end one, even if the story was still quite open; it was a cliffhanger ending, but cliffhangers are different from merely ending abruptly. But I think cutting off Ned's head was definitely the right choice.
There are other stories which don't really have endings; The Lady or the Tiger is an infamous example, though the lack of an ending on that has a very clear purpose, as it is a rumination on human nature. It did frustrate a lot of people, but I thought it was fine.
There's also American Psycho, which I found enjoyable; the protagonist clearly was losing it, but the ending just further throws into question how much of what we saw the protagonist do was real.
I wish I could put what I think about this into words, but I'm not sure quite how to get a handle on my opinion. I think there is a certain pleasure in being made to feel something. Sometimes the shocking thing, the emotion you didn't expect, the sudden despair without reason, can be... how do I put it? Permission to experience what you ordinarily avoid experiencing? There's something cathartic about reading those kinds of stories, when they're done right. I have enjoyed a lot of stories that do that sort of thing, including "All The Pretty Pony Princesses."
But for me, at least, in order for there to be any feeling, the author has to do more than just grab for the cheap "feels". The car accident thing, for example, I'd really have to see in a larger context to know if I'd hate it or love it. As it is, it isn't anything. I don't care about it, because it doesn't have a context to make me feel anything. It doesn't speak to me, because I know nothing about the people involved, or how it would affect their lives.
I do very much enjoy traditional stories that neatly package their emotions with tidy endings. But there is something to be said for stories that speak to the real world experience, and to the chaos and uncertainty that happen in real life.
1986200
Setting aside (and BH, please correct me if I'm wrong) that the passage is paraphrased from a college reading by a skilled author, isn't this exactly what makes it effective for its shock value? Not that I'm a fan of shock, but the setup and delivery struck me as highly effective. I was drawn into it like everyone else, and had to re-read the last sentence before the reality struck me. It's exactly how I imagine most people, bystanding near and just catching the last instant, would respond. Confusion, shock, disbelief, horror, panic.
Not normally my thing – I prefer at least a little foreshadowing before something terrible happens in a story – but for its sheer slap-to-the-face shock, this certainly worked on me.
1986239
Well, I guess I was using the wrong reference for what Bad Horse meant. I guess no death in ASOIAF is really like what he asked, though some lesser happenings, such as Jaime losing his hand, might qualify.
I still think that ASOIAF goes for shock a bit too often, though. I guess Titanium Dragon mostly explained why I feel like that, so I won't repeat the same arguments here.
(BTW (spoiler for the end of A Dance With Dragons), John Snow wasn't yet confirmed dead, and even if his body perished he was a natural skinchanger, so his consciousness might have survived inside Ghost; I wouldn't count his death as a shocking event just yet.)
1986465
If you mean this kind of no warning whatsoever, everything changes in a flash thing, then I have seen that only few times.
I still stand by the deaths of Caramon and the brothers of Palin I mentioned in my earlier post — the death of Palin's brothers being the most glaring case, as they were sons of heroes, already adventurers of renown, and then one book simply starts with them having been just killed. I'm not sure if that was the right thing to do; it worked, helped set the tone quite a bit, but left a bitter taste.
Terry Pratchett sometimes pulls that for comedic effect, of all things, and IMHO actually manages to pull it well (even when Death doesn't appear in person). It's uncanny how he manages to make events that should be shocking appear funny instead. As far as I can remember he keeps this kind of sudden death to minor characters, though.
I've just seen another in The Princess Bride (which I'm currently reading); the author spends most of one chapter building the relationship between Buttercup and Wesley, and kills him with the phrase "Which was why Wesley's death hit her the way it did." Seems to be done to make the story feel even more surreal, like something to not take seriously, given the way the author uses parenthesis for the same effect, and I believe in that sense it worked.
1986671
I think the issue with this is, essentially, a lot of the shock which comes from A Song of Ice and Fire is that it goes there and does things you wouldn't expect; Ned was set up to be the protagonist of the first book, and so when he dies, it is very shocking.
The problem is that at this point, the author has severely damaged the idea of plot armor for the main characters; if NED isn't safe, then no one else really is, either. No POV character died in the next book, which helps them recover a bit (maybe he's just doing it once?), but in the third book, the Red Wedding plus Joffery's rather sudden death (and less shockingly, the murder of his grandfather) combined to really diminish our ability to believe in plot shields - these are surprising to people, but beyond that point, it is very hard for the books to surprise us again because now we know the real rules - characters can die, even characters who otherwise "should be" immune. So when we get around to book five, we are increasingly less shocked by "shocking" deaths because, while the rule holds in general, it does not hold for this series - it has lost its ability to shock us with characters dying ignominiously.
I think this is why the series feels like it lost its way; the series needed to be short and punchy for all of these shocks to really be effective, as the longer the series goes on, the more we come to understand the rules and the less shocking the book series can really be in murdering main characters. So while the first few shocks worked well, after numerous major characters have died, it is hard for us to really be too surprised anymore. Plus it probably actually has gone on too long; there is only so far you can take a plot like this before you've lost all the characters we came to care about.
Pretty much never. Or if they did it felt so natural that I didn't notice the abruptness and incompleteness, which is more likely.
But if I did it always felt like the author had just lost interest and blown off the story. And with it the reader. Namely me. And I always suspect they preen about it afterwards (in fact many do).
I guess it's the closest thing to being d****d and dunked that a straight white guy will ever experience..
1986465
Well gah, now I feel bad. I thought you were quoting something, and now it's just me complaining about how you paraphrased it? Way to go, Bradel. Though I guess it means you get credit for throwing together that very nice descriptive bit beforehand as well.
Other than making me feel like a jerk, though, I don't think my opinion changes too much. I think 1986621 is right that the violation of expectations is exactly what's called for, and I guess I made a bit of a hash with my point about that. It's important for the shock value, but the flip side is that I think doing something like this means walking a thin line between losing the shock and throwing the reader too far out of the story when the shock comes, so they don't know what happened (which was kind of how I felt). And I draw a distinction here between reading a passage and not understanding what the author intended, versus reading a passage and refusing to believe what it's saying—which is what, I feel, Iain M. Banks accomplished so well with the two sentences at the heart of Use of Weapons:
Similarly, my reaction to the film "The Prestige", which is completely upfront with the plot twist, explaining it to you multiple times, but which I completely failed to grasp because of the sheer horror of it. I think the best shocks are always the ones we understand and instinctively refuse to accept.
1986561
This is why I made the comment about being perhaps too distant from my first reading of the books. I understand that what you're saying is the majority view, and I think there's a lot to be said for subverting tropes in the way GRRM did, especially in the series' first three books. But I genuinely have no memory of being shocked by any of it. I don't know if that's because I didn't find it shocking or because I simply forgot about it, though. It could very well be the latter. As much as I've liked GRRM's stuff, I've also tended to find it kind of forgettable.
How forgettable? I was living in Japan when the fourth book came out. I came home for Christmas the year it was published, bought it, and read it. Then I went back to Japan. The next Christmas, I came home and was shocked to discover that GRRM had published a new book in his series, and wondered how I could have missed it. I eagerly bought a copy (which was in paperback now—I thought to myself about how living in Japan meant I just couldn't get books in a timely fashion). I went home and started reading it. A few chapters in, I finally figured out that I'd already bought a copy of the book and read it a year before.
1986760
For me, at least, having plot armor not be believable anymore has another issue (besides making it harder to surprise me): it prevents me from getting emotionally attached to characters.
I don't know how other readers react, but in my case, if I'm not reasonably sure a character will end the story alive, I can't get emotionally attached to it — which, in the case of ASOIAF, means I can't become attached to any character anymore, and even the ones I had an attachment at first have lost it. This makes the books far less interesting to read.
Not really something conscious on my part, BTW. And the reverse can have an interesting effect for me in a story with high tug mortality but good plot armor; the moment a tug is promoted to a main character with plot armor, I often (and suddenly) find myself caring for it.
1986805
One of my favorite quotes from one of my very most favorite SF novels. I love the surprise and ambiguity this quote represents, the question that it raises through to the end of the story. This was a wonderful example of something that was led up to with many clues, but even in its ambiguity still surprised me.
BTW, I hope you didn't think I was being critical: I was just making sure that BH was actually paraphrasing, rather than something like him having an eidetic memory (which is entirely possible).
Everything Ray Carver ever wrote. Closure would have numbed the impact of the events of those stories, and without that impact, those stories wouldn't have been anything at all.
This reminds me of an argument I heard someone make once that Hamlet should have ended immediately after Hamlet died. The impacts of those deaths are dulled somewhat by the attempt to establish some normalcy at the end with whatshisface's little speech. Those deaths wouldn't have been shocking in the way you mean either way, because they're built up throughout the entire play. But they might have been more so if the play left the audience at that point, and never gave them any kind of chance at closure. I'm not sure that would make the play any better, though, which is the real question.
Kafka's The Trial ends pretty abruptly, even considering the fact it is unfinished (there is a gap of a few chapters before the ending). The way K gets butchered in a back alley for a crime that isn't even revealed is very unsatisfying from a reader stand-point, but it makes perfect thematic sense, reinforcing the absurdity of law, and the issues with that flawed legal system.
Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment is similar in this regard, with the last few chapters pointing to the idea that the character is being redeemed by understanding the error of his ways, only to be sent to a Siberian work camp for the next 20 years. There is no reason for it to end otherwise, it is essential for the narrative, but leaves you feeling absolutely miserable.
I could also point to the first season of the Code Geass anime. Two episodes from the end, the main character accidentally binds his pacifist sister to kill all japanese, with whom she was about to broker a peace treaty of sorts. This destroys everything he had worked towards so far, and forces him to kill his sister. In the end he is captured, brainwashed, and the season ends there. It is a shocking ending, since everything so far progressed, more or less, on a upward spiral. It also makes perfect sense, with all components of his downfall being well established, and closes the season in a very distinctive note. Sure, it has a second season that expands upon that, but if taken as a stand-alone series (a very real possibility, considering how production could have happened), it is an ending that absolutely lacks any kind of closure.
There's one ending scene in Siren Song that does this for the opposite effect (taking an overwhelmingly negative situation and turning it around very quickly). It was used to start turning the story around after having it thrown down a bottomless pit and to keep up hype during a long hiatus. I don't think that's what you were looking for, but I wanted to point out that shock can be used for feel-good reasons.
There are two violent scenes in Siren Song that do bad shock fantastically in the middle of a chapter. The first was used after a long period of dangerous-situations-where-no-one-important-gets-hurt. It was done to bring the readers back to "reality". It also ended up showing me how attached I had gotten to the character being bludgeoned. I don't think I would have cared as much for that character if it wasn't for this scene.
The second scene was used as part of a deceptive buildup. It was foreshadowed a sentence earlier (if you can call that foreshadowing), but the actual thing was far more extreme than expected. It was there to demonstrate the extent of a character's fear while making sure the reader doesn't forget that nothing is right with Vision. It also signified the beginning of a \(she was right | she's insane\) roller coaster.
Shocks are sudden emotional highs. I don't think it's a stretch to say that most people don't equate "emotional" and "attached", but they seem to be highly correlated. Maybe being shocked by a story is evidence of you getting attached to the story. If a story can be judged by its ability to hook readers, then it should be easier for good stories to shock its readers.
I think there's a fallacy in your original post in assuming that all readers want to feel good. Of course it feels good to feel good, but feeling good about feeling good does not imply wanting to feel good. It doesn't make sense to say that people feel good feeling depressed, but it could make sense to say that people want to feel depressed. It could also be that people want more than just to feel good.
1986982
I finished Background Pony entirely because I believed the author wasn't being lazy in this way, and I was wrong. Quite a sense of betrayal.
I ended up leaving a comment on it ripping into their narrative choices, and pointing out how their thematic buildup could easily have lead to a good ending, except they chose to make more sadness porn instead. It didn't even seem so much like a mistake in constructing the story as a personal despair over the theme. If the author can't believe in a good ending to the story they've written, then the story won't have one.
I think that's what makes sadness porn and generally making people sad so much easier than uplifting them. In order to uplift someone, you have to have the emotional maturity to go through a dark place and then escape it yourself. In order to depress someone, you just have to be able to tap a vein of depression. Anyone who can be uplifting can be depressing. Not so the other way around.
It's really about entropy versus building up structure and meaning. I'm real suspicious of your whole 'shock' concept for this reason because it seems like you're trying to make excuses for entropic, demoralizing shock because… why? Because the world contains meteorites?
If you want entropy, kjasckhaiob aciawgdiabvjd cakjqigfiyevb. Big deal!
There's a big difference between entropy and epiphany. As a writer, you want to be setting things up with endless artifice and fuss, so that you can hit the reader with a sudden and cataclysmic shock that strips away everything they thought they could expect about the scene, and REPLACES it with a completely new and significant structure that all hangs together and works. That's what you want to be doing.
I pulled this off pretty well in 'Rarity's Worst Day Ever' and I'm working on it again on a couple levels in the book I'm on now. Specifically, the ponies get trapped in a battle with rogue Princess Luna, who appears to have defeated them. Twilight, the big gun of the bunch, is unconscious. Trixie's kidnapped and in the power of Luna, and has always resented Celestia and Princesses in general, but appears to be falling under Luna's power. Trixie and Twilight have teleported Celestia with a mage-meld and got in trouble for it, and it was done by Trixie tapping Twilight's power. In a sudden unexpected move, Trixie runs to unconscious Twilight and melds for all she's worth, and Celestia appears (as she had before), and Trixie cries, "Princess, help us!". At a stroke, the power dynamic of the battle is upended, but it also means that Trixie has made her peace with Celestia and the concept of Princesses being supremely powerful forces to call on. It's like Trixie abruptly turned to the side of good, away from self-involved rebellious posturings, and this evolution of her character is summed up by the new idea, "Princess, help us" in the context where that is most meaningful.
And that's what I mean by the sudden shocking event having a great deal of underlying structure to go with it. To do it properly as a writer, you've got to set things up so that, rather than the pointless random obliterating of something supposedly important, you are flipping a switch and everything the reader 'knew' is wrong, and there's a whole new reality that they instinctively understand, and it makes SENSE. It's that whiplash that people really like, if you can do it. At least half the effort is in setting up the 'after-shock' so that the new structure is immediately apparent.
Just randomly taking away a bit of structure (even central structure) only to surprise, is uslss.
Heh. No, not mainly, anyway. Keep reading.
1987178 Hamlet is a play that I think has sloppy closure. It feels to me like a story that I've finished a second draft of but still haven't figured out what it's about or how to make it come together, that I've written a lazy ending for ("kill everybody; that's dramatic!") and then set aside in the hope the inspiration for how to fix it will come later.
I have a hard time with Shakespeare. I know lots of brilliant people love all his work, so I think there must be something to that; but then those same people praise his comedies, which I'm sure are crap. I began listening to lectures on Hamlet by Harold Bloom recently, but after the first hour it was obvious that Bloom was just making up outrageous claims that were all untrue except in his own addled mind.
I used to hate unhappy or pointless endings and hopeless stories on principle. They didn't agree with my worldview, they didn't agree with my personality and positive outlook on life, and I believed they were a straight up lie in regards to the grander truths in life (if you believe in that kind of truth)--though not that the authors were lying or didn't believe in what they wrote, because they did.
Now my worldview hasn't changed, neither has my optimism and hopefulness, but my perspective on life has gained experience, and my mind knowledge (the correctness of which being up for debate, of course)--so now I can appreciate unhappy endings or hopeless stories or apparent pointlessness. Remember, experience and the expression of its meaning can (doesn't have to, but can) play a large role in fiction, and indeed be its guiding purpose. If I encounter a story that has an abrupt ending, feels incomplete, is unhappy or hopeless, or whichever, I consider why the author did this. Were they trying to convey an idea, or some part of what life means to them? If a terribly sad ending is the best way to meld an idea to the reader, and that is the goal of the writer, well...can I say that's wrong? Even if it's in regards to a theory of what constitutes a story (not a fact, or at the very least, a fully discovered one)? The most I think I can do is disagree with the idea, and perhaps discuss if the ending really served the author's guiding intent or not. Though maybe I'm wrong.
You have to ask yourself what the purpose of fiction is, and how you answer the question is going to, I think, determine where you fall on these issues, on how people use stories and certain tools or methods (such as abrupt violence). It's also going to influence (obviously) what you think classifies a piece of work as a story, as well as how narrow or open that definition is (such as your assertion that stories have to portray a moral, or be morally upright in some way, or have properly concluding character arcs--and forgive me for any misinterpretation of your views).
As to whether there is one true definition or purpose of fiction (or a set of them) out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered...there may be, and perhaps it's already been found, but I don't think people will ever accept it, or accept any one view, no matter how true, simply because there are so many who derive meaning for their lives from the debate and the search of it, that finally settling on an answer would leave them without something to do--it would leave them without a purpose. Though disagree with this as you may.
1986982 How did Hamlet make use of the character deaths? I've always wondered about that.
I don't think I said anything like that. A key paragraph is,
My main point is that maybe part of the requirement for dramatic structure is that, if the story takes us through terrible emotions, it should do so more gently than real life does, because stories aren't real life, they're practice for real life.
1990001
You didn't. I thought that was one of your assumptions because I couldn't figure out where else
could have come from. Likewise, I don't see where "stories are practice for real life" comes from.
Adding on to 1989924, I think any useful basis for judging stories is going to vary widely from person to person, not because I think there is no common basis for judging stories, but because any common basis is going to be general enough to cover everyone's reasons for reading, and any selection of a basis that generally applicable is likely to be unfalsifiable.
EDIT: I missed the "dramatic structure" part of your last post. If this is specifically for dramatic structures, I think the original post is unclear.
That scene. I can't decide if I love it or loathe it, but I'm certainly fascinated by it.
And it's all for the same reason!
I do remember reading a story, two pages or so in the anthology, with a shocker main-character-death ending. I'd say that one worked, my theory is that's because it was a shock to the character.
1988336
In contrast.
A very well-known and well-respected defense industry blog is in fact called War is Boring.
And oh hey look, that blog's got a review of a movie about a guy who is not Tom Hanks getting kidnapped by Somali pirates:
1987908 Have you got a copy of your comment? I tried to find it under Background Pony, but there's 89 pages of comments.
I see I've screwed up this post. I've taken some different pieces of evidence, added some of my earlier ideas about story structure, and come up with some hypotheses. But I didn't distinguish what I thought was true, what I'd explained in earlier posts, & what I'm just guessing here.
"Readers don't want to be shocked" is an idea just in this post, that dramatic structure is there to avoid shocking the reader. I don't know if I've explained "stories are practice for real life" before, but it's part of the same idea: Stories have dramatic cues and resolutions to take the reader through an experience that would be incompletely understood and painfully abrupt in real life.
Here's one I thought of: You follow JMEd, right? Did you see his post with the readings of "the Cremation of Sam McGee"? That seems to have a (admittedly more mild) shock ending.
Then, it also has more of a "punchline" structure, and I suspect punchline structure uses its shock on purpose.
1994794
I didn't have a copy, but I remembered the chapter to which I had attached the comment. I only had to go through a few pages of comments.
It looks like I might have misremembered the content of the comment. Nonetheless, here it is:
Given that this is specifically a discussion of how the story's ending failed, I think we're beyond spoilers. The antagonist of the story ("Aria") was a dead alicorn who could not die. Her death was an incomprehensible tragedy to her mother, who promptly shut out all knowledge of her existence, shunting the not-quite-dead Aria over to a demiplane, and condemning to be forgotten all who found evidence of Aria's existence. The concept of "the one becoming many to learn" is lifted straight out of the story, so the idea of THE power of the setting rejecting a new concept means that someone must be wrong about someone. Either the cosmology is wrong, or the Matriarch is discordant, or Aria herself is discordant. Given that Aria is the one presenting the cosmology and she shows neither awareness of the incongruency nor concern for the suffering she is inflicting on others... Of course, it's possible that it was the Matriarch, or both.
Even if it was the Matriarch, then in the storm of unmaking that would follow Aria turning truly rebellious against her fate, the power of the One would come together again, and the Matriarch could have her errors shown to her that she might sing the Dawn's Advent herself and finally be done with an eon of grieving. (This is the kind of thing that the Elements of Harmony tend to be written as representing.) At which point the power of the now-healed Matriarch to sing reality into existence could have sung it back into existence with some minor edits. Nopony would have to forget their memories and the Unsung would be released (not to mention Aria herself).
The cycle of songs that served as the evidence to Aria's existence was intimately tied to her circumstances. It described horror, trying to forget, mourning, but also eventually moving on. The Dawn's Advent was a song of melancholic triumph. That there is a dawn. That good things can happen even after a grief fully admitted. The author doesn't seem to have believed that, in the end.
1988336
My theory in this post is that one of the purposes of fiction is to walk us through experiences that would be shocking in real life, and minimize the shock with dramatic cues. I'm not trying to justify shock.
1995385 I can't find user JMEd.
1999539
Sorry. I assumed that was appropriate in the same way as using "GoH" to refer to Ghost. Here's the blog post in question, shouldn't matter which recording you listen to what you'd really be interested in is the poem they're of.
Somehow, the last time I loaded this blogpost, I managed to load it right between your last two comments.
2001560 Oops. Brain malfunction. I use JMEd the same way.
Good point: The ending of 'cremation of Sam McGee' is completely unexpected. But it's a funny, happy shock out of a morbid story. Doing it the other way around would be a fail.
You're absolutely right about wars being very different demons at different times in history. In ancient times, I imagine that the violence of battles was not sudden at all. You had drums and maneuvering and a growing din of jogging armored warriors until the clash. Every thing that was going to hit you, you saw. Even a sword swing to the back of your neck, your pricked neck hairs and that sixth sense we all have tells you split second before you're hit that you are going to die. I imagine that nano second of feeling is like that wide eyed terror you feel when you are water skiing or wakeboarding, and you realize that you put your tips or edges in just the wrong place and that that next wake-wave is going to catapult your face into the sea. It's the same way with alpine skiing: you know you are out of control the moment you lose control, and in cruel flash of inspiration, you know why. All this and posturing was main duty of an army in the field back in those days. In the high middle ages, battles were exceeding rare. Sieges were in that age, as in all previous ages recorded, the commonest military action.
Basically, my point is, the Crimean War Tolstoy is describing was very much as he described it. It was one folly and confusion after another, thanks to the completely incompetent commanders on both sides. You can find a nice documentary on the war in full on youtube. However, war was not always this way, and it is not that way now. Wars had more hope in them in other ages consequently. I do not think that Tolkien's War of the Ring was a bleak and wasteful a thing as the Crimean War or the Korean War was. Given the technology of war we can assume Tolkein's armies to have had, a worthwhile victory could have been expected by both sides. Even with modern technology where victories are always bitter, when you are fighting a war against your own extermination, as the Gondorians were and as the allies were in World War II, sallying out still has more hope in it than letting the enemy rape your land.
Also, to your question about narrative closure: I don't think the author's job is to gently bring readers out of a catastrophe, I think his job is to wrench him out like a person that has fallen through the ice. Hopefully, the author will have taught the person how never to fall into that hole again as well.
1986035 Sometimes you end the story with violence because of how immoral that violence clearly is. I'm thinking of Hemingway's "Up in Michigan" and "The Bull Fighter". Both drive home the points that date rape is bad and bull fighting brutal (respectively), and they do it by the suddenness of their violent scenes.
2055787
Context is everything
Just saying it's not always this way,2055802.