Being a Better Writer: Ambiguous Stories · 9:25pm Sep 24th, 2018
Today’s topic is going to be a bit of a vague one, I’m afraid. At least initially.
No, that wasn’t a deliberate play on words (okay, maybe a little), but more as a starting admission of my own limited experience with this topic. Which makes it sound like I’m admitting a lack of knowledge on it. Which isn’t true. It’s just that I (and my posts) tend to have come at this topic with a different approach than what has been asked after for this one.
What am I talking about? Well, the request for this was “Ambiguous characters and plots” IE characters and stories that are “vague” about what’s actually going on. An ambiguous character, for example, is a character where the reader is unsure of their motivations or objectives, or even facts about the character themselves. Likewise, an ambiguous story is one where the reader is unsure about what’s really happening, even as the story is being told, such as a story told by an untrustworthy or unstable narrator being ambiguous because we don’t know for certain if events happened the way that they’ve claimed, or if the narrator is “fictionalizing” their own account.
There can exist a certain bit of charm to these types of stories and characters (which is both why they’re written and why they’ve been asked after as a topic here). A story in which events or even the characters are ambiguous, when written well, can be exciting and teasing at the same time, constantly keeping the reader guessing and striving to put the clues together on their own to separate fact from fiction to discover the real story.
At the same time however, that’s written well. A poorly written ambiguous story or character, by contrast, will confuse and irritate its audience, often to the point that many of them will put the book down and find something else to read.
The trick, then, is being the former and not the latter. But in truth … it’s really hard to be the former. And unfortunately easy to be the latter. Because ambiguity is more than just cutting out certain details so that the audience doesn’t know what’s going on. Sure, you’ll end up with an ambiguous story … but one that’s also a mess of cut content at best, a disaster of confusing elements at the worst. No, crafting an ambiguous story (or an ambiguous character) involves careful cutting and replacing in such a way as to keep things balanced on the edge of a knife.
I've found that ambiguous stories usually work best when they're short. A couple of my favourites that come to mind:
* Who We Are
* What If I Told You There Was a Changeling in the Basement of Carousel Boutique?
* Hellpiercer
* The Regalia
There's another one that's on the tip of my tongue, it came out right after Twilight's library got nuked and is a first-pony maudlin musing about what it's like to lose one's home, but I can't quite find the title. Will update this comment if I find it.
I think we should distinguish between the different ways in which the audience is uncertain about what's happening.
The reader isn't sure how to interpret what happened, e.g., who's right or wrong.
The reader is encouraged to empathize with, or given the POV of, a character whom the author believes to be in the wrong.
The reader never knows what happened, because the story stops before telling us how it ends, or it remains a secret within the story.
"Would It Matter If I Was?", GaPJaxie, 2016.
The story breaks the 4th wall in a way that suggests the story is phony and highlights its own artificial nature, so that the reader feels like the ending given isn't the "real" ending.
The story stops before telling us how it ends, and implies that the ending isn't important or doesn't ever happen.
The reader isn't sure what actually happened, although the POV character is (one type of unreliable narrator).
The reader isn't sure what actually happened, because the POV character is psychotic (another type of unreliable narrator).
The reader isn't sure what happened, or else how to interpret what happened, because he/she is led to doubt either that there is a "true" narrative about what happened, or that "what actually happened" is the right question to ask.
The reader doesn't know why people do the things that they do, because the people themselves don't know why they do what they do.
The reader is misled about what happened for a long time, because the narrator doesn't understand what's happening for a long time.
The types that appear around 450 BC, 1600 AD, and 1950 AD are all associated with post-modernism, and all focus on breaking down the reader's/viewer's socially-instilled idealistic certainty, whether about morals , the rationality of humans, or the nature of reality. "Post-modernist" narratives appear at these times because those are the 3 main times in Western history when a culture of certainty began to develop doubts about its received narratives.
By contrast, "The reader isn't sure what actually happened, although the POV character is" and "because the narrator doesn't understand" use uncertainty to generate surprise. "The story stops before telling us how it ends" and "the ending remains a secret" are used to make the reader think. None of these types of ambiguity question the existence of a "what happened", and so they aren't post-modern.
Post-modern ambiguity isn't possible in cultures that don't distinguish between mythology, religion, dreams, and reality, e.g., Native American cultures or Homeric Greece, because there is no expectation that every story has a "what actually happened" beneath it. They aren't important in tribal cultures in general, because such cultures are usually interested in what is admirable rather than in who is "right", so that the concept of "what actually happened" isn't considered important.
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Tuesday is my crazy busy day, hence the lack of reply. But this is a great comment.